


the fear of losing hold

by ambivalentangst



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Don’t copy to another site, F/M, Grief, Hurt/Comfort, Immortal Peter Parker, Multiverse Shenanigans, Not Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant, Not Spider-Man: Far From Home Compliant, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Tony Stark Has Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-03
Updated: 2019-08-30
Packaged: 2020-07-30 15:44:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 29,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20099644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ambivalentangst/pseuds/ambivalentangst
Summary: Tony is the first to admit that he's an absolute mess, the likes of which most healthcare professionals wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole, but in his defense, he's down an arm and a kid he saved the universe to hold again. With that in mind, he's rapidly coming to the conclusion that he either needs to chill on his caffeine intake, pain meds, or, more likely, both because said kid is standing in front of him, confused, possibly concussed from falling out of the goddamn sky, butalive,and Tony can feel his world crashing down around him.





	1. I

It begins with the light of the snap. Tony grapples with the pain as his fingers brush past one another to fix all that’s gone wrong even as common sense screams that in doing so, he’ll never see Morgan grow up, never watch Peter become the future, never kiss Pepper again.

He’s right about exactly one of those concerns.

The pain is a thousand different points of electricity turning his nerves to nebulas, arcing up his arm and face only to fizzle out before it can reach his heart. It hurts, it’s next to the worst thing Tony’s ever felt, but he expected more.

The issue lies in what Tony  _ expected.  _ Maybe if he’d looked farther ahead, beyond Thanos ogling his empty gauntlet to the figure wrapped in his own work darting across the battlefield, things would be different. The thought crosses his mind later, but when the pain stops and the light clears, Tony is at first only aware of the weight on his wrist. It’s agonizing, stretching his ruined flesh past his limit, and he stumbles, falling over what he realizes a second later is a person.

He lands face-first into the dirt, shoving himself up on one palm despite the ash blowing in his eyes to find Peter attached to his arm.

It doesn’t process.

“Kid?” he asks. In another world, he might watch the army they’re fighting flake away. In another world, it might be him that doesn’t respond. In this one, Peter’s eyes follow him weakly, occasionally sliding too far to one side. Tony shakes him a little, trying to dislodge his hands on his arm as if it will make things go back to normal. “Kid, come on. I missed you too, but this is a little ridiculous.” Even without considering Peter’s clinging, his arm feels like someone is ripping his arm from his shoulder, like his face is melting clean off his skull, but Tony’s eyes don’t leave Peter.

The stones have burned through the Iron Spider, charring the fingers that still don’t loosen their grip on Tony’s makeshift gauntlet. The black of irreparable skin explodes up his arms, ensconcing his hands that tugged the stones to his chest and left that a sickening shade of blood-dark too. It’s horrifying, but there’s nothing like the very ends of the damage, creeping up his neck and seeping into the corners of his lips in a pattern that Tony can only see as webbed.

Peter makes a little gurgling sound, jaw clicking uselessly as he tries to speak. “Mr. Star,’” he eventually manages, more a sigh than actual words.

On the edges of Tony’s vision, the others gather in varying stages of realizing  _ oh god, it’s the kid _ . There’s Steve, hand pressed over his mouth. Thor, who lets Stormbreaker thud to the ground. Pepper, holding onto Rhodey. His mind has registered what’s going on now, and his thoughts race, a tantrum he can’t have because Peter is lying beneath him, stuck on his arm and too broken to put back together.

_ No, no, no—not him. Please, I’ll do anything, not him—not him—it isn’t  _ fair.

He tries his best to hide his panic.

“Right with you, bud,’” Tony whispers, using his good hand—shaking, no matter how hard he tries to calm himself—to brush his hair off his forehead. He doesn’t say everything he’s feeling, how Peter needs to get up, quit looking at him like that and go home to May, for fear of upsetting him. The skin the stones torched has nothing on the way his heart splits in two. He did this all for him, everyone is back because of Peter, and now he’s leaving again. Tony could scream at the injustice of it all, but Peter rolls his head into the touch and whimpers softly, even as his lips curl in a small, defeated smile.

It occurs to him, then, that he was an idiot for believing Titan was the worst it could be.

“‘Love you,” Peter whispers, and Tony chokes on the willpower it takes to hold back a sob. He doesn’t want to cry in front of him, doesn’t want to let on how scared he is that Peter is slipping through his fingers with every shallow, rattling breath he still has left to give.

Peter is dying for Tony, and all he can do is hold him. Nothing’s changed, Tony realizes.

_ Stupid, stupid, stupid. _

“I love you too.”

The feeling, never before spoken between the two of them, is suffocating, everything Tony’s always felt and never been brave enough to admit shoved in their last chance for anything at all.

Peter’s smile gets a little soupy at that, soft and warm despite the way his eyes keep trying and failing to focus on any one thing. “T’ny,” he breathes, and with the little not-even-a-word, sounds younger than ever.

Tony presses his lips together and knows that, however cruel it is, it’s also the other half of his cry on Titan.

_ I don’t wanna’ go _ —

“I’m here.”

Tony will never know how Peter managed to get over so quickly, adhere himself to the suit at the last possible second. Even with whatever his sixth sense is, even with the power of adrenaline Tony knows like the back of his hand, it should’ve been impossible. Keywords:  _ should’ve been _ .

However Peter did it, it’s a secret he takes to his grave. A breath leaves his lips, and he never takes another.

_ but if this is what it takes to win, I will. _

Tony bows his head, and at last, the tears come.

//

Tony makes it to both the private and public funeral at the vehement protests of every single one of his doctors and parks his wheelchair next to May for the entirety of each. He gives a eulogy at the public one, something about everyday heroism, Peter bearing the weight of the world and how many people were bettered for it. He wrote it, sure, practiced it into the wee hours of the night until his tongue ran over the paragraphs like a well-worn path. The words still taste like ash, and once it’s over, he has no idea what he said—only that he meant it.

It’s hard to care about whatever the public heard when he goes to sleep every night with one or both of Peter’s dying faces branded onto the backs of his eyelids.

He doesn’t give a single shit about the photos that circulate afterward, the shots putting his missing arm and bandaged face on blatant, nearly crude display all over the internet as most of New York City and all of Queens show up to pay their respects to Spider-Man. He especially doesn’t care about the ones that focus on his remaining hand in May’s, both of them squeezing so hard their knuckles shine white.

What does make his heart skip a beat is when Morgan gets behind the microphone, Happy lifting her so she can reach, and she stares out into the sea of faces with wisdom beyond her years. He’s still numb, full of love but unable to sort out his feelings with the aching of his heart, and though he can hear the sniffles of the crowd as she speaks, he only finds himself remembering one thing from her speech, earnest and just the right thing to split all of Tony’s broken pieces down the middle. 

_ “I’m really glad Petey saved Daddy.” _

She visits a lot in the hospital, and Tony can almost make himself function for her. She burrows into his side when his doctors and Pepper aren’t there to stop her, talks about her day like nothing is wrong, and the only oddity there is when she mentions that she’d like it if he’d come home.

“When you get back, can we have juice pops?”

It’s a recurring question, and Tony always smiles, promising her whatever she wants. It’s when she asks if he can tell her a Spider-Man story that the illusion cracks. He doesn’t mean to shut down, and Morgan doesn’t know the effect of her question. It doesn’t change the fact that a nurse bursts back in the room upon hearing Morgan’s panicked cries.

“Daddy? Daddy— _ Daddy! _ ”

Tony stares at his lap, unresponsive, hand balled into a fist. Later, he’ll overhear the nurse talking to Pepper in the hall, thinking he’s asleep, and find out she shook him, terrified, trying to get him to say something, even acknowledge that she was there. Personally, Tony remembers nothing of the incident past the innocent cock of Morgan’s head, followed by visions of glassy eyes and charred skin.

Pepper makes sure there’s somebody else in the room when Morgan visits, after that. 

Tony dreams, more vividly than even the aftermath of New York. He wakes up screaming night after night, thrashing and wanting more than anything to hold a boy who lies under six feet of earth and a marble statue of his alias. Eventually, the nurses give him a button so he can tell them not to come check on him. It’s almost embarrassing, but Tony prefers that he’s the only one to see him wrapped around his knees, swept up in visions of rust-stained planets and blinding light.

How long did he get Peter back for? He’s done the math but forgets the result every time. 

(It was enough for a hug, but not for Tony to memorize the specifics of how it felt.)

All that, time travel and Natasha and another alien invasion, just for Peter to die anyway. Tony isn’t fool enough to think there’s any reversing things, this time.

Logically, he knows they saved the universe, but unable to look at pictures of Peter, he feels like it’s a zero sum. He knows that if Peter hadn’t been there, Morgan would be growing up without a father.

(It goes in circles in his head—Peter or him and what would be the worst outcome. In the end, he always chooses himself because even if he’d gone in Peter’s place, Morgan would’ve had a brother left.)

One day, a few before he’s to be moved from a SHIELD hospital to a new facility he had in the works after the snap, Strange visits.

Tony wakes up to find him sitting in his room, one of the few people that haven’t been in so far. He’s sleeping less, which is both a blessing and a curse, depending on how bad the nightmares are. Strange meets his gaze, still bleary with sleep, but doesn’t smile, which Tony’s grateful for. Nothing is normal right now, but Strange softening would be too much.

“You’ve got terrible bedside manner, doc,” Tony jokes, voice flat. “Got tired of haunting the sanctum?”   
  


“Something like that.”

Silence, heavy and tense. Tony is trying—really, honestly,  _ trying _ —and sometimes, he can go a few hours without remembering it. Strange is a punch in the face, bloodying his lip and breaking his nose with the memory of “ _ I’m backup”  _ and  _ “No, you’re a stowaway. The adults are talking.” _

“What do you need?” 

Tony shifts on the bed. It’s harder to find a comfortable position with only one arm to maneuver himself, even more so with the fact that his shoulder and face still burn with radiation.

Strange’s gaze—icy and normally self-assured—drops. “I came to say I’m sorry.” His voice is hardly gentle, the opposite, actually, grave and low, but it all but bleeds earnestness. “I know how much he meant to you.”

Tony stills, fingers clenching on the blanket. Strange doesn’t say his name—doesn’t need to. “Yeah, well,” he clears his throat. “What’s done is done, right? I’m supposed to be pulling myself together at this point. Couple months in, people start getting antsy when you aren’t moving along with the whole five stages.”

“Stark.”

It’s one word, even if it is his name, and Tony finds himself irritated by all that it’s capable of implying with Strange’s stern—almost chastising—tone. “I don’t need the lecture. I know, okay. I’m working on it.”

“Pepper asked that I talk to you.”

_ Ah. _

A few questions clear in Tony’s mind. He knows Pepper is worried. She and everyone else who cares was hoping he’d be less volatile by now. He knows he’s acting weird, too gentle around May and faking too hard around everyone else, unable to find a happy medium and losing his shit when the wrong person reminds him of what happened.

“About what?” Tony snaps, not caring that he’s cutting him off. “I don’t need a therapist.” That’s definitely not true, and Strange’s eyes narrow. “If you want to act normal, that’s fine. If you want to talk about him, leave me out of it.”

Strange manages to look guilty, so Tony’s right on the money. “She mentioned that it might be helpful to see a fresh face. I considered that you might want to talk with someone who knew him.”

At that, Tony flares up. It’s such a little thing, a poor choice of words at worst, that he shouldn’t be angry about anyway, but Strange is there, and Peter isn’t, which is the whole problem.

“ _ Knew him.  _ Yeah, sure. Sorry, Dolittle, he saved your ass, you threatened to let him die to save the stone, and then he did.  _ Twice.  _ I don’t think that really constitutes  _ knowing  _ someone.”

Nobody should get to say they knew anything about him much outside of May, Happy, and Ned. The arrogance of it makes Tony seethe.

“I didn’t mean it that way,” Strange tries to placate him, but Tony’s on a roll. It’s almost a talent, the sheer amount of vitriol seething in his words despite barely having the strength to leave his bed, but he’s lashed out before in more dire circumstances.

“No, you didn’t—you couldn’t have. And you don’t  _ get  _ to be sorry because you saw it coming. If you’d told me, I could’ve fixed it. He didn’t have to die. It should’ve been me. It  _ would’ve  _ been me if you’d just opened your mouth and gotten off your high goddamn horse. He shouldn’t have had to be the hero.”   
  


“Stark—”

“Get out.”

Tony’s hand is fisted in the blanket. He’s just woken up and is already exhausted from his rant. In the chair, not even having moved, Strange looks tired too.

Pepper sends him a bouquet later, a  _ thank you for trying. _

“I truly am sorry.”

Tony reaches out to the nightstand by his bed and lobs the empty glass there at Strange. By the time it reaches him—explodes into the wall in a thousand fractals of misplaced rage and grief—he’s gone. Viciously, Tony hopes a few shards made it through the portal.

When he plays the incident back that night, he’ll think that Peter would’ve flinched to see it. Peter blunted Tony’s sharp edges, but it seems that in the wake of his death, they only grow more jagged in an attempt to fill the void. 

With that in mind, Tony hangs his head for a moment to bolster himself and then proceeds to pen a letter in shaky, pained writing, in which he outlines his mistakes and offers an apology. It’s nice to pretend that he’s capable of that kind of rationale all on his own, like he’s not motivated by the guilt twisting his stomach. The result is almost an olive branch, except that while Tony is genuinely sorry, a part of him he tries to bury still wants to wring Strange’s neck for his part in letting Peter get his arms around the gauntlet.

(What rolls through Tony’s head that he’s not healed enough to admit is that even with five years to stew, he didn’t remotely anticipate what Strange had seen from day one.)

//

Tony does see a therapist, given time. He’s motivated almost entirely by the fact that Pepper sits down with him and informs him that he’s scaring Morgan, so he has to get it together if he wants her to keep visiting.

(The idea of losing her sent his breath racing and hand fisting in his hair the second Pepper left the room, not that she knows.)

His therapist’s name is Leigh, and Leigh is good at her job, probably. The path to her office, however, might as well be lined with burning coals for how Tony wants to flee every time he comes down the hall. She wants him to talk about it, and he gets why. He can’t keep having panic attacks when people mention Peter’s name, but anything having to do with him is newly precious. He feels like he has to ration what memories he has, like if he exposes too many, he won’t have anything to remember him by.

“I want you to find a project,” she tells him, carefully watching the way Tony grips the armrests of his chair. They’ve discussed how having something to do helps him. “Something that  _ might  _ make you think about Peter, but also something that can distract you if you find those thoughts to be overwhelming.”

“What the fuck does that even mean?” he growls to Rhodey later. He’s allowed to be in a wheelchair now with the cradle having helped most of his damaged skin scar properly, and Rhodey’s on pushing duty. They’re taking a tour around the new facility, which Tony designed but hasn’t technically seen since he’s been recovering from a solid dose of radiation poisoning. “It’s too specific. I don’t even know where to start. Anyway, what project am I supposed to be able to do with one arm?”

“Because you’re so incapable of making something to solve that problem,” Rhodey mutters dryly. Tony’s glad Rhodey, out of everyone, is normal. As soon as Tony started being awake for longer than half hour increments, Rhodey was there with the sharp tongue Tony’s known for decades, goading him into banter and easing the pain of his loss.

“Platypus—” 

Tony means to fire something equally snarky back or maybe just continue like he hadn’t said anything, but it doesn’t matter what he had planned when he stops to consider what Rhodey said.

Helping his limited physical ability, was it? 

Rhodey’s leg braces might’ve been his first major foray into the medical field, but Tony’s hardly incapable of something more. He’s seen Barnes since it all went down, and while his arm is gorgeous, it’s not his style.

“Honeybear, have I ever told you that you’re a genius?”   
  


“Considering my degree in mechanical engineering, you could stand to mention it more often.”

“Considering my multiple PhDs, I think I’m good.”

Rhodey cuffs the side of his head for that one, and Tony’s so busy grinning until his cheeks hurt he almost forgets that it’s been six months to the day since the final battle.

(He and Leigh spend the entirety of their next session dissecting the nightmares that come when Rhodey isn’t there to chase Tony’s demons away.)

As uncomfortable as therapy tends to make him, building his prosthetic does help. There’s no great homecoming as he settles back into the familiar groove of invention, and Tony’s okay with that. It’s enough to feel at ease, bristling only occasionally when he imagines what Peter might say as he works via hologram.

_ “That’s insane, Mr. Stark!”  _ or, more simply,  _ “Wow.” _

It hurts, but Tony thinks that stitches are finally, slowly pulling his heart back together, the burn of loss turning to an ache.

May seems to be doing better too, her skin less gray and hair less brittle when she comes by. She tells him she won’t be needing the small fund he’s kept open for her as she’s gotten back on her feet—she has a new job at a nursing home in the Bronx, a good different from what used to pay the bills for her and Peter but still scratching the itch she has to help.

(The fact that May lived through the snap but never got to see Peter again is one of many things that still send Tony into his spiraling bad days, days where he doesn’t get out of bed and won’t speak to anyone who visits save for Morgan, days where all of his energy goes into making sure he doesn’t destroy another of his children.)

Leigh is the first person to see the arm aside from Helen, who helped him attach it.

She’s very good at being stoic and is always perfectly reserved, responding politely to any of Tony’s inquiries but quick to turn the conversation back onto him, so Tony feels a little thrill of pride when her jaw drops, dainty fingers running over the tech, the reactors set into the nanites that swirl for her to see.

“It’s good to see you showing off,” she tells him just before they actually get into their session.

Tony fakes indignance, but when she raises a brow in response, he isn’t even really annoyed. In a different, kinder world, he thinks a living Peter would be proud.

//

Nobody is happier than Morgan to see Tony come home. Pepper and Rhodey put on a whole party, and while the cake’s good and the pictures he gets with Barnes of them showing off their arms are even better, the icing on it all is the way Morgan sits on his lap or hip the whole time. Tony acknowledges that she’s probably too old to be carried, but he also acknowledges that he hasn’t been able to properly hold her for the better part of a year, so he does what he wants. Her smile is worth it as she works her chubby fingers through his hair and he sneaks her so many juice pops she’s nearly sick.

Pepper’s goodnight kiss—chaste and sweet, a sigh of relief for his return—comes with a whiff of her perfume as they get into bed that evening, and neither of them mind when Morgan worms her way between the two of them a few hours later.

It feels like home, like everything might just settle again, even if Leigh suggests that Tony take down the picture of him and Peter above the sink—just while he adjusts, she assures him, and they’ll reintroduce it over time. It still feels something like betrayal when Pepper tucks it gently into the box with the other things that they’re worried might set him off.

(Tony gets it, but he still wants to see him. Peter’s official memorial is all the way in the city, after all, and if Tony lets himself hide from his memory, is he really honoring his sacrifice?)

He shares a lot of things with Leigh, but he’s worried that if he questions her and voices his hesitance, Pepper will find out. He’s been doing good, and he doesn’t want her to think he’s too unstable to see Morgan.

It’s an irrational fear—Pepper has told him again and again that she’s ready to manage a rough recovery, hell, she’s  _ been  _ managing a rough recovery, not to mention Leigh telling her would be a breach of confidentiality—and so is the still-lingering worry that talking about Peter makes what he had with him less real. It doesn’t stop Tony from having them.

“Would it be okay for us if I had lab days again?” he asks Pepper one day, Morgan playing outside with Happy while they have a lunch for themselves.  _ Lab days,  _ as he calls them, have become non-existent over the past five-some years. The only lab he had was at the compound, and that was too big and too clean without anybody using it. Tony tried to go back a few times, but it unnerved him, a mini ghost town without Peter bouncing off the walls and tinkering alongside him.

The new facility is nice because it’s ground Peter’s never touched.

He’s run the idea by Leigh, who generally supports most of Tony’s attempts at normalcy as long as they keep his mind open to come to terms with his grief.

“Do lab days remind you of Peter?” Leigh had asked.

In the beginning, he had  _ hated  _ her for always saying his name because she had no idea of all that he meant. It made him furious like he’d been with Strange, like she was claiming to understand who he’d been.

“Yeah,” he’d admitted. “He’d come down Tuesday nights and the third Saturday of every month—like clockwork.” He hadn’t said anything about how Saturdays tended to bleed into Sundays with movies and pizza as Pepper steered the both of them into the kitchen for a break.

“I think that would be good for you,” she’d said, and now with professional backing, Tony feels unusually nervous, studying Pepper’s blue eyes for concern, irritation. Tony wants to make progress, but he wants Pepper to believe he’s making progress more. It’s part of his constant worrying that he’s being selfish, a bad husband, father—that he’s being like Howard.

However bad he misses Peter, he tries to focus on making Pepper and Morgan happy. Peter’s gone, but they’re still there and alive and  _ perfect _ . 

Tony would do anything for the two of them.

Pepper just smiles, squeezing his hand. “You don’t have to ask, you know? It’s okay to take time for yourself. We’ll still be here.”

Tony  _ knows,  _ but what if he messes up so bad they aren’t?

(It was his oversight that got Peter killed, a belief he hasn’t quite confessed to Leigh yet, and he can’t make that mistake again. That means checking everything is in its place, that nothing is going to fall because he turned his back thinking things were secure.)

“I love you,” Tony says, instead of voicing that concern, and then Happy’s shouting turns their heads as Morgan somehow gets on his back and steers him around the backyard by his hair. “Besides, I’m not asking for permission as much as being sure I don’t upset you when we’ve got a good thing going.”

The both of them laughing cuts off any more conversation, watching their five-year-old tame Happy, and while Tony is pretty sure he could let go of her hand without issue, the warmth of it is nice. When they get up to get a better view out the backdoor, Pepper’s head on his good shoulder tells him he doesn’t have to.

Tony would never say that his family is anything he needs to get away from, but his off days are a breath of fresh air, change in the routine. He can always have side projects at home, but having a full lab is freedom, the world at his fingertips if he can put his mind to cracking it. Whether he works on something for SI or just tweaks to his arm, he’s alone for it. He wasn’t sure he would like it as much as he does, but he’s able to relax without someone nearby that, even if only subconsciously, he feels the need to protect.

(When he’s alone, nobody sees him turn to talk to Peter and have nobody there. Nobody watches his face fall and the breathing exercise he does to bounce back from it.)

The night before he leaves for what’s supposed to be two days at the new facility, he heads to bed immediately after he tucks Morgan in because Pepper is only encouraging towards his efforts to get back on his feet insofar as she’s sure he’s taking care of himself, which Tony reluctantly admits is reasonable. If that means an eight o’clock bedtime, he can deal with that.

He drops a kiss on her cheek from where she’s seated on the couch, responding to some e-mails from SI’s board. They’ve been trying to distance themselves from the company even before they fixed the snap, but it’s not a cut and dry process. “I’m headed to bed,” he tells her, and it’s almost funny, the ways their roles have reversed over the years.

Pepper looks up for a second, smiling even as she reaches out and her hand hovers over the scars on Tony’s face. “You’ll come home if it gets to be too much, right?”

He nods, and while maybe it wouldn’t be the case before, he means it. He thought he knew what was important after the first round with Thanos, but not being able to trust his handiwork—because, at the end of the day, he was the one who put together time travel, forgot to handle Nebula and made the final battle possible—has reframed things once again. The thought of lying, even just slipping a little, white one into the mix, is terrifying when he thinks about how it could be the last thing someone could know as the truth. “Pinky promise.”   
  


At Pepper’s laugh, he keeps going. It’s the little things that make her happy that he loves, easy to pour his affections into and capable of making his heart swell every time.

“Those are legally binding, you know. Doesn’t even need paperwork. Little miss in the other room has sworn me to a tea party when I get back with one.”

She leans up to press their lips together, still smiling, and Tony wonders how he got so lucky.

When he wakes up that morning, his scars ache. The cradle is pretty amazing, but not even it is capable of fixing him entirely. He groans in time with the creak of the mattress as he gets out of bed and stumbles into the attached bathroom. With the door closed to block the sound, he rubs his eyes and splashes water on his face. “Time, FRI?”   
  


“3:45 AM, boss.”

“Disgusting,” he responds despite having set the alarm himself, blinking at his reflection. Given time, he dresses and pads to the kitchen for a cup of coffee for the road. Other than that, he’s not taking anything with him. He’s got stocked bedrooms built into the new place, which is basically a less glamorous version of the compound. It’s got living quarters with the lab, training rooms too, even a pool he threw in for the fun of it and also because his physical therapist said swimming would be a good exercise for him. Anyone left of the Avengers has a standing invitation to visit, but it’s been vacant for months now. Everyone’s trying to get their lives back in working order or already has—Tony just happens to need the facility to do the same.

He’s yet to think of a proper name for it because the Avengers aren’t a thing anymore, and Leigh’s told him it’s fine to not want to hear it described as the new compound. Names don’t matter anyway, he thinks when he rolls out from the lake house.

He couldn’t drive for a while, but being behind a wheel is as soothing as it’s always been, the purr of the car beneath him comforting in its familiarity. He parks it alongside his other, equally ostentatious rides in the garage and walks inside. The drive to the new place is solid—an hour and a half or so—but just long enough for him to collect his thoughts and calm himself down a few times when those wander into dangerous territory.

(In his break from his car of choice, he forgot that Peter had a few CDs stashed in it, even when Tony teased him for having them. He tried to play one but gave up a song and a half in, pulled over and panting for breath.)

Tony passes through the kitchen en-route to the lab and grabs a banana from the selection of food he hired someone to stock for him. Before he left the house, he took some of his meds, but they haven’t completely stopped the pain lying under taut, red skin. Tony ignores that, focusing on the positive: he has over seven hours of uninterrupted, nightmare-free sleep and twenty-four ounces of black coffee in him and plans to utilize his current mental stability to its fullest potential. The pain is less than ideal, but Tony has dealt with worse for longer and gets to work.

The hours slip by with the flurry of tools and the bots’ attempts at help. One of Tony’s first projects was restoring them to their former glory after the collapse of the compound, and while it’s weird to see them shinier than normal, their programming is outdated as ever.

He’s just turned to chastise DUM-E for the umpteenth time for dropping a wrench on his organic hand— _ I’ve only got one of those left, and you’ll have to explain to Pepp why it’s gotta’ get amputated too, not me, so your funeral, pal _ —when a flash of light and  _ energy  _ blows him off his feet and into the closest wall.

Tony feels his heart catch, panic settle in because it’s just like it was then except there’s no gauntlet, just the burnt smell hanging in the air and the bots beeping in alarm. He tries to get to his feet but lands back on the ground when he hears familiar— _ impossibly  _ familiar—muttering where he just was.

“Fuck, that hurt.” 

In another world, Tony might cuff his kid’s head for cussing. In this one, he blinks, like clearing away the spots dancing across his line of sight will do something to stop the fact that he’s hallucinating, must be. U has puttered his way over to him, and Tony props himself on his side, probably more rough than he should be on a machine that’s been blown up multiple times.

“What even is this place? God, where’s the accelerator?  _ Fuck,  _ where’d she go?” The conversation is clearly one-sided, something Tony understands from years of talking himself through ideas and anything else he needs to get sorted.

Tony  _ understands _ , but frankly, he doesn’t care because this is too much, too fast, and fuck his mind for doing this shit to him. Leigh’s going to have her work cut out for her in their next session, and Tony thought he was doing better.

“FRIDAY, call Pepp,” he mumbles, debatably coherent in doing so. He doesn’t dare look in the direction of the voice. Pepper will calm him down. He didn’t think he was messing with anything explosive, but he’s been known to cause accidents when he hyperfixates. That’s the only plausible explanation, his mind deduces, running through possibilities at light speed.

“Wait, what? Is there someone here? Oh shit, sorry, man—my bad. Hey, you wouldn’t happen to kn—”

Tony’s head snaps up viciously when he feels a hand on his arm, ready to cut through whatever illusion his mind has apparently conjured up to torture him. His own intent fails him immediately upon meeting a chocolate brown gaze he last remembers glassing over in his arms.

Peter Parker’s mouth falls open, and Tony tenses in his grip, eyes widening despite himself.

Peter—except it’s not him, it  _ can’t  _ be—recovers first, and both his smile and voice are shaky when he speaks. 

“Hey, Mr. Stark. Long time no see.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi! If you couldn't tell, this fic is going to be something of a wild ride, but I have good news: it's entirely pre-written. That being said, updates will be weekly—on Fridays, to be specific—and I'm beyond excited to finally share this project, which has been in the works since June. With that in mind, be sure to read beginning notes if they're present; in upcoming chapters, they'll have trigger warnings.
> 
> While we're here, there are a few things this fic ignores: Tom Holland’s height according to Google, the actual MCU timeline, the location of Tony’s lil cabin in the woods, and more, I’m sure. Elements of the idea of a particle accelerator as well as Doc Oc as presented in Into the Spider-Verse are also explored in this fic, but they don’t adhere to the same rules, so that’s something to be aware of too. Why are these things ignored? Plot convenience and also because I say so.
> 
> If you liked what you read, kudos and comments are always appreciated! Thanks for stopping by, and if you want to yell at me about this fic or anything else that strikes your fancy, I have a Marvel-only blog that can be found [here!](https://ambivalentmarvel.tumblr.com)
> 
> Edit: Updates are now on Sundays!


	2. II

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw: vivid descriptions of a panic attack

Tony thinks he’s going to be sick. It could be the combination of caffeine and the pills, he reasons. It’s never been a problem before, but Tony’s something of a fragile person at this point in the game. It wouldn’t be out of the question, really, but it’s hard to think of why he’s apparently gone insane when Peter’s right there and feels as warm—as  _ alive _ —as ever.

He shoves Peter off him, just as Pepper’s voice comes through on the lab’s speakers. “Hey, everything going okay over there?”

Tony did call her to calm down, but looking at Peter, thinking about what Pepper will say, he’s suddenly more scared of making her think he’s regressed than facing the impossibility in front of him.

Peter looks around, startled, and Tony puts his pointer finger to his lips even as he responds. “Yeah, it’s peachy. I’m just checking to see how Morgan’s holding up.”

_ Who even says peachy,  _ Tony thinks, hoping Pepper won’t say anything about it.

Pepper, bless her heart, doesn’t question him for a second, and Tony feels something in his chest grow tight with his own deception. “I’ll put her on the line,” she replies, taking Tony’s apparent worry in stride. Her call of Morgan’s name carries through, and soon Tony has to motion for FRIDAY to turn down the volume as her voice echoes through the room.

“Daddy!” she cries. “Mommy said we can have juice pops with lunch since you won’t be around to sneak me some before dinner.”

At any other time, Tony would find that genuinely funny, but Peter—who should be  _ gone _ —is somehow standing there, pale but obviously listening to the conversation. He forces a laugh and hopes Pepper isn’t around to hear how bad it sounds. “Really? Well, you tell mommy that I don’t appreciate the slander, but I’m glad you’re having fun.”

Almost instantly, he can hear her parroting what he just said but still can’t bring himself to smile.

“I’ve got to go, okay? I’ve got work to do, things to make. I’ll talk to you later.”

Morgan’s ready acceptance of his goodbye leaves a sour taste in Tony’s mouth. “Bye, Daddy!” she coos, and the line is dead before he can even say it back.

Peter blinks at him a few times, and Tony sees the shine to his eyes clear the longer he does so. He doesn’t know what to say or how to react, and when Peter tries to remedy the situation, the sound of his voice might as well be a physical blow for how Tony takes a step back.

“Mr. Sta—”

“Stop,” he snaps, and as much as it hurts, Tony scrutinizes him, looking for imperfections, anything that his mind might make fuzzy without having seen a picture of him in months. For his part, Peter listens, mouth parted and expression crestfallen in a way that’s so  _ him  _ it takes his breath away.

(“ _ No, this is where you zip it!” _ )

The first thing Tony notices is that he’s not wearing his suit. Whatever he’s got on is still skintight but is pitch black, and while he has a mask in his hand, the eyes are just as dark. It’s a change of pace, to be sure, and Tony doesn’t know how to process it or that, upon further inspection, this Peter looks marginally younger than his had been in the end.

It’s a weird hallucination, to be sure.

“Fuck,” he breathes, a hand coming to cover his mouth. Peter shifts on his feet, obviously uncomfortable, and Tony figures he should do something about his presence. “You know, my therapist tells me I’m doing okay—I’m going to therapy, now, which would be news to you—but seeing you here, I gotta’ say, I have my doubts.”

Peter’s brows knit together, but Tony is busy both processing the unimaginable reality in front of him and also trying not to lose his shit and keeps on trucking. “Don’t know why my subconscious would put you in that outfit, though. It’s not a big fan of creating—more of the reminiscing type, really. Doesn’t make much sense overall, but the other option is that you’re real, which I’m vetoing now before I start thinking too much about it.”

“I  _ am  _ real,” Peter insists, and with his high, just-shy-of-cracking voice, Tony hates how convincing he sounds.

“Are you now?” Tony replies with a bitter, borderline hysterical laugh. “That’s a trip, ‘cause I could’ve sworn I saw you buried—what was it—eight, nine months ago?” Tony still doesn’t do too great with visual reminders of him—the picture frame has yet to return to the kitchen—or explicitly acknowledging his death, but it seems the universe is pressing all of his buttons this morning.

Peter’s face screws up then, an amalgamation of emotion that’s there and gone too fast for Tony to even begin deciphering it. “I’m—what—dead, here? Where  _ is  _ here, by the way?”

“New stomping grounds, kid. No compound left after everything, so I downsized.” Tony turns away from him, shaking his head a little as he turns and leans on a table for support. His eyes clench shut, his breath coming shorter than usual. “You know, I’m working up to using variants of the d-word. I get you’re my guilty conscious speaking and all, but if you could tone it down, that’d be great.”

“I’m  _ real.  _ I probably need your help, actually, so could you hear me out?”

“I pinball pretty hard between denial and depression, kid, and you’re not helping anything.”

“ _ Tony.” _

That brings him up short, at last. The word on Peter’s dying breaths, the name of the man who brought him into the fight. He looks over his shoulder to stare at Peter, hard, and is greeted with a stern expression, not exactly hostile—stubborn.

“Sit down, please. I need to talk to you.”

Tony kind of wants to tell him to back off and let him have a breakdown in peace, but there’s something challenging about the way Peter holds himself—his stance, the set of his mouth—that almost says if Tony doesn’t do so willingly, he’ll make him. 

His eyes narrow at his confidence, less because it irritates him and more because that’s something new, but he does as told. 

His Peter had still gotten starry-eyed around Tony from time to time, stumbling over his own tongue. This one stays standing, pacing as what presence he’d briefly commanded dissipates. 

“This is going to sound like a mess, and it kind of is, to be fair, so hear me out. Basically, I was fighting this one lady—Olivia Octavius? Ever heard of her—no, you wouldn’t have, but that’s not important. Bottom line, she made a particle accelerator  _ thing,  _ and I say thing because I found out about it about a half hour before I busted in to stop her. Not a whole lot of time to figure out details, yeah?” 

Tony privately wracks his brain for any incident with someone similar in his Peter’s escapades but comes up empty-handed.

Peter pauses for breath, wringing his hands, but launches right back into it the second he’s done. “She did her whole monologue thing, and apparently, it’s supposed to open doors to alternate universes, but I’ve already been dealing with whatever bad shit comes through to mine, and let me tell you, I really don’t think it’s worth the scientific breakthrough or whatever. It’s bad news, warps the fabric of space-time and all that, and I was going to shut it down, but she got the jump on me, and now I’m here in what I’m guessing is an alternative universe, and I don’t know how to get back.”

He stares at Tony openly, pleadingly, asking him for an answer he’s clearly gotten lost searching for himself. He doesn’t even know where to begin with the clusterfuck the kid just set in front of him, but through the muck, he finds something curious.

“We’ll get to that. First of all, did we do the whole airport hat and dance where you’re from?”

A nod, a little confused but not defiant like before.

“Toomes?”

That’s more interesting. There’s a second that hangs too long in the air where the kid freezes, expression inscrutable before he nods again. That leaves Tony with one last question, and even the idea of voicing it feels like a knife buried between his ribs: “Thanos?”

Peter’s head tips to one side just so, brows knitting. “Who?”

Tony should probably investigate the validity of Peter’s claims more, he knows that, but he doesn’t think there’s a person alive who could convincingly fake that response. Everyone—good, bad or otherwise—lost someone. He runs his hands down his face, trying to recover from the idea that there’s a version of Peter who was never lost to the snap, who never died for good fixing it. “Don’t worry about it,” he croaks at last, eyes on his lap.

He’s almost relieved, almost lets his guard down, and then he thinks of something else to ask. “What about New York?” 

Tony can feel Peter’s eyes on him, watching, gauging his reactions. “You’re gonna have to be a little more specific,” he says after a moment.

Tony lifts his head slightly, just enough to watch his face as he clarifies. “Was there a battle of New York or not? 2012? Aliens, ringing any bells here?”

Peter takes a second to regain his bearings, eyes shifting as he thinks on the question. “Oh,  _ oh.  _ Yeah, that happened. It was just a while back is all. Took me a second.” A beat, where Tony’s mind processes the imminent crashing and burning of Peter’s world—universe. Oblivious, Peter keeps going. “So I have a question for you now. What year is it here? I’m just asking ‘cause you seem—uh—pretty caught up on it, so I figured—”

Tony’s lips move and cut him off— _ “2024” _ —but when thinking back on the conversation, he won’t remember saying anything.

If New York happened, then there must be somebody, at the very least,  _ similar to  _ Thanos out there calling the shots where this Peter comes from. 

“Know anything about the Snap? Vanishing? Capital s and v?” he mumbles, testing the waters. Maybe it already happened, he reasons, with a different villain at the helm. There’s loads of room for interuniversal discrepancies, he tries to reassure himself.

“Definitely no capitals,” he replies quickly, topping all the confirmation Tony needs off with a snap of his own pale fingers—light, carefree.

Tony resists the urge to scream in frustration, indignance. Peter—any version of him—doesn’t deserve to carry the burden of the universe, but Tony thinks of how many times it all would’ve been over without the kid’s help and knows he doesn’t have a choice but to send him back to lift it. He straightens up, and if not for the constant fear of not being good enough for his family, might’ve had one of the bots pour him a drink. It’s hard work, faking calm, and Tony is sure Peter notices that his quick smile—meant to be reassuring—is far too tight. 

“Yeah, we gotta’ get you home, kid.”

Tony hates himself for understanding that this Peter has yet to meet his match and still throwing him back to find it, and yet, assuming they roughly follow the same timeline, there’s not even a year before it all goes to shit.

“It’s—what? Late 2017, early 2018, where you’re from?”

Peter looks away from where he’s staring at the wall, nodding. “Yeah, yeah, yeah—totally. March.”

Tony processes and finds his chest aching for another Tony, oblivious to the threat on the horizon and all that he has to lose in a matter of weeks. “Okay,” he manages, though his mind won’t shut up about how small this Peter looks, drawing comparisons from his fluffy, mask-ruffled hair to the blood in his’ curls when he died. “That makes sense. So what’s with the getup? Get blood on the suit again?”

Peter looks blankly back at him.

“The suit? Red and blue, webbed? Obnoxious as all hell?”

That seems to clear the confusion from his face, and Peter nods quickly. “Oh, right. The  _ suit,  _ and—uh—yeah. I was pretty tired and stepped in during a mugging, and you know the—uh—”

“Your built-in crystal ball?”

“That—it doesn’t work super great when I’m not a hundred percent. And, you know,” he mimes what must be said mugger using a knife, smiling sheepishly, “oops. So I have this loaner. Quick fix and all that, but it’s stealthy.

The kid’s stumbling through his explanation, off in a way that’d have an explanation if he really thought about it, but Tony doesn’t. He’d be thrown off his rhythm too if he landed in an alternate universe where he was—

(Tony was serious when he mentioned having issues with denial.)

Noting Peter’s reaction to his predicament barely takes a second, as does realizing that this kid’s Tony wouldn’t have given him the Iron Spider yet. Immediately, he decides that’s a good thing because if the kid showed up in it, he probably would’ve lost it altogether.

In the dead air that follows the explanation, Tony is helpless to do anything but size Peter up, take in all that he’s been missing for months— _ years,  _ really, because those few minutes he had with him in the end don’t count. All he wants to do is pull him close and keep him there, safe because Tony would die himself before he let anything come near the kid again, but it’s not his Peter—not to hold and not to keep.

It’s a new kind of pain, sharp and unexpected, knowing for a fact he’s going to lose him again.

“Come on,” he says at last, turning away. “I’ve got some calls to make.”

//

It’s been a while since he’s seen Bruce—seen any of the others, for that matter. Tony thinks that for them, hanging around him is something of an unpleasant experience, a reminder of years lost or the pain of sticking them out. Furthermore, most of them are pretty successfully moving on. He’s the one they have to dance around, after all the years he tried to make sure he was the one who could take whatever anybody threw at him.

If they’re afraid of nudging him towards an outburst, Peter is a wildfire burning Tony’s fuse to a crisp.

They’d had time to spare before they could start work on getting Peter back home, all of which was tense, full of things they wouldn’t say for fear of making the atmosphere even worse. Giving him clothes other than his too-dark, replacement suit—one of Tony’s band tees and some pajama bottoms—and even feeding him could only take up so much of it.

After excusing himself for a shower, most of which he spent with a hand on his chest, convincing himself that the sheer panic overwhelming him, was not, in fact, a heart attack, he thinks he could be doing worse, even though this Peter is almost a mirror image of the one he lost.

Even Bruce, who Tony called in from D.C. and his work to reorient the world post-Snap, looks pale when he walks into the living room, bringing the agonizing wait to begin to an end.

“ _ Tony, I can’t just  _ leave.”

_ “I’ll make a public appearance to talk up whatever cleanup project you want, I just need you here, now.” _

_ “Tony _ —”

_ “Amazing what support you get for saving the universe. If that doesn’t do it, I can blackmail whatever politician you think you need to be there to sway.” _

_ “That how bad you need me?” _

_ “You don’t know the half of it.” _

_ “The bribe’s not necessary. Rest up, okay?” _

Tony knows Bruce means well, but his mouth opens and closes nervously, eyeing Tony like he’s about to explode at any second. It’s a well-founded fear, but all Tony does is offer a strained smile and a wave. “Bruce, Peter. Peter, Bruce.”

“Hey, Dr. Banner.” For as casual as the greeting is, Peter sounds like someone’s got him in a chokehold—his words gritted, nearly strangled. 

“Hey,” Bruce replies slowly, eyes darting back to Peter every few seconds even as he speaks to Tony. “Can I talk with you for a second?”

Tony thinks about telling him that Peter will be able to hear them wherever Bruce wants to talk but chooses to give him the illusion of privacy. “Yeah, sure thing. Be back in a sec, kid.” 

Tony can feel his questioning gaze on him as they head into the next room over but is distracted from it as Bruce rounds on him, which is pretty disconcerting now that he’s a) green and b) about eight feet tall, if Tony had to wager a guess. “ _ Tony,”  _ he hisses.

“I know.”

“Is it him?”

Tony didn’t mention specifics on the phone for this very reason, and he shakes his head. “Kind of. Apparently, he’s from an alternate universe—something about a particle accelerator. I need you to help me put him back.”

Bruce is pacing, rattling the furniture as he does so. “And you just took his word for that? This opens up so many possibilities, changes how we look at physics as a  _ whole _ —”

“Is that a yes or a no?”

At that, Bruce stops for a second, staring at Tony like he can see through him. “What? Of course I’ll help, it’s just—he’s—you know—”

“I  _ know,”  _ Tony snaps. He’s had enough reminders of the morbidity of the situation, each one sharper than the last, for the day. “Look, I want this done as fast as possible. He’s got people over there he’s probably missing, and I’ve got enough to discuss with my therapist. Will you head to the lab? Take him with you? I still have to take care of some things, and he’ll fill you in better than I can, anyway.”

Bruce is still looking at him like he might break, but he nods. “I can do that,” he says, soft. “You don’t have to come down right away, you know? If he’s as smart as you say, we can get a head start without you.”

Tony waves him off, though the offer makes him realize how much he’s missed this, the easy way intent and information flows along the wavelength he and Bruce stay on. “No, don’t worry about it. I’ve got it under wraps; I just need to tell Pepper what’s going on.”

Bruce brightens at the mention of her name, and Tony would bet he’s thinking of Morgan too, who loved climbing all over him when they met. “Tell her hi for me?” he asks before heading for the door.

Tony nods, and that, at least, is easy. “Anytime, Jolly Green.”

He waits for the sounds of Bruce’s footsteps to fade, taking Peter with him, before he collapses onto a chair and puts his fingers to his temples, rubbing gently. “FRI,” he mutters, exhausted from the effort it takes to stomach the vision of a dead man— _ boy _ —walking.

“On it, boss,” her accented voice confirms with what almost sounds like sympathy, and for the second time that day, Pepper picks up the phone.

She sounds breathless, likely having chased Morgan around the backyard, and Tony hates himself for the bombshell he’s about to drop on the domesticity of it all. “Hi, honey,” she greets. “Everything okay?” she asks, and there’s an edge there, the words a little too fast, almost like she already knows.

Tony grimaces alone in the room. “About that,” he begins and hears her suck in a breath as if she’s bracing herself. “It’s been an interesting morning.” And so he explains, trying not to sound as worn out as he feels. 

When he finishes, he’s unbelievably, endlessly grateful to hear her sounding unflappable as ever in her reply. “Only you,” she sighs, something of a joke except for the fact that she—despite his best efforts—intuits better than anyone that the whole situation is someone tugging at all of Tony’s loose threads, unraveling him bit by bit. “We’ll be there in a couple of hours. I’m assuming you aren’t going to be coming back anytime soon.”

“I don’t think so.”

(The idea of letting Peter—any version of him that’s not permanent—into his home is terrifying. Tony wouldn’t be able to cope if his afterimage ruined it for him, all that he has to prop himself up on as he struggles to his feet. He  _ likes  _ the lakehouse—the new facility too—because it’s untouched by Peter, and by extension, the brunt of Tony’s grief.)

“Alright.” Another breath, more steadying, accepting than the first. “Who all have you told?”

“Next to nobody,” he tells her. “Just you and Bruce. I called him in from D.C. to help fix things.” He doesn’t say what he fears—that for every person who knows there’s another waiting in the wings and wondering when he’s going to fall apart next. “He says hi, by the way.” 

That, at least, makes her smile—he can hear it in her goodbye. “Tell him I say hi too, and I’ll see both of you soon. Love you.”

“Love you too,” he tells her, and FRIDAY ends the call.

To his credit, Tony does take some deep breaths, think over what Leigh has told him about coping mechanisms, before he heads back in to face the music. He mutters the counts to himself as he walks—ten in, ten out—and when the door slides open to reveal Bruce and Peter facing some blueprints, he thinks he’s ready.

It’s when Peter glances over his shoulder at the sound, flashes a smile—just as blinding as Tony remembers—that things go wrong.

Tony hasn’t had an honest to god panic attack in hot second. He went into shock initially, surrounded by everyone who made the victory possible. He’s been told that Rhodey flew him to a hospital, that it’d been touch and go on him for a while, and when he woke up, the drugs had fogged his immediate memory and someone had to fill him in again.

He does remember what the second go-round felt like, his chest tightening, the denial that quickly devolved into screaming, angry and wild.

It’s the first bit of that hitting him like a semi now.

He stumbles back and out of the room, automatic door making way for him to stumble into the wall and nearly flat onto his ass. Instead, he moves down the hall, hand splayed against it for support because the walls are closing in and he can’t  _ breathe. _

With his prosthetic arm, he claws at his chest, his throat, and while he’s had time to adjust to it, there’s been nothing before this to test the limits of his control.

By the time Pepper and Morgan show up, bruises will be forming in its wake.

Tony’s head races, foggy, and the room is spinning into the weak curl of Peter’s lips as he died in his arms. It’s the worst kind of terror, blindsiding Tony and wiping away all rationale.

They  _ had  _ lab time, nearly a year and a half of banter and the light in Peter’s eyes when he learned something new. Then came the spaceship, then came Titan, then came Tony failing to save the one thing he risked it all for.

(Him in his arms, bloody and coming undone by the second.)

_ “I don’t wanna’ go,”—“I’m sorry,”—“Mr. Star,’”—“‘Love you,”—“T’ny,”—“I don’t wanna’ go,”—“I’m sorry,”—“Mr. Star,’”—“‘Love you,”—“T’ny,”—“I don’t wanna’ go,”—“I’m sorry,”—“Mr. Star,’”— _

His last words play over and over in his head alongside that fucking  _ smile,  _ and Tony thinks he’s going to be sick until he realizes someone  _ is _ speaking to him—not slurred, but clear, insistent—and it’s not all memory.

“Mr. Stark, can you hear me?”

He can, but he can’t say anything— _ he couldn’t  _ do  _ anything— _

_ “Right with you bud,’”—“I love you too,”—“I’m here.” _

A hand on his shoulder. That’s different. Peter was wrapped around his arm, clinging to the gauntlet. His head jerks up, and to his surprise, Peter’s there, whole and hovering above him, expression furrowed in concern.

“Mr. Stark, it’s Peter. Breathe with me, okay?”

The hand moves down, pressing his palm to Peter’s chest to feel it expand and contract, proof that this version of him is still alive.

“No air,” he gasps despite that he listens on instinct to what the voice is saying.

“There is. Come on, in and out.”

He hears what Peter says and copies him, but what really brings him back down is the cotton of the t-shirt he finds himself bunching his fingertips in—not metal, corroded with the force of the snap, and not wet with blood. It feels  _ normal,  _ like they ended up working later than planned and Peter needed pajamas for the night.

Eventually, Tony sits back, roughly running his fingers through his hair as he reorients himself. Peter’s still crouched in front of him, concern riddled all over his face. A couple feet back stands Bruce, wringing his hands and clearly unsure of his place in the scene. “I’m good,” he manages at last, not quite able to bring himself to smile. “Let’s get to work. Kid’s not going to get home by himself, right?”

He stands, dusting himself off before walking back into the lab. 

As much as he’s pretending the circumstances haven’t ruffled him, he can’t fool himself into ignoring Peter’s eyes burning holes into his retreating form.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The plot thickens!! This chapter was actually supposed to be posted with the third as some kind of monster 10k chapter, but I decided to split it apart because I said so and also didn't want to edit all that at once.
> 
> -
> 
> Hi! If you couldn't tell, this fic is going to be something of a wild ride, but I have good news: it's entirely pre-written. That being said, updates will be weekly—on Fridays, to be specific—and I'm beyond excited to finally share this project, which has been in the works since June. With that in mind, be sure to read beginning notes if they're present; in upcoming chapters, they'll have trigger warnings.
> 
> While we're here, there are a few things this fic ignores: Tom Holland’s height according to Google, the actual MCU timeline, the location of Tony’s lil cabin in the woods, and more, I’m sure. Elements of the idea of a particle accelerator as well as Doc Oc as presented in Into the Spider-Verse are also explored in this fic, but they don’t adhere to the same rules, so that’s something to be aware of too. Why are these things ignored? Plot convenience and also because I say so.
> 
> If you liked what you read, kudos and comments are always appreciated! Thanks for stopping by, and if you want to yell at me about this fic or anything else that strikes your fancy, I have a Marvel-only blog that can be found [here!](https://ambivalentmarvel.tumblr.com)
> 
> Edit: Updates are now on Sundays!


	3. III

Three hours after he called her, FRIDAY’s voice rings through the lab to announce that Pepper, along with Morgan, has arrived at the facility. It’s a welcome break from running simulations that all seem to fail, Peter’s expression permanently rumpled as he tries to scrounge up what details he can think of.

Tony gets that the kid was on a tight schedule, but “it was big” and “it felt like getting run through a noodle maker” aren’t the most helpful hints.

“I’m headed up to greet some visitors. Wanna’ come with?” he asks, looking at Peter, who suddenly has the distinct look of someone who’s just had the rug pulled from beneath their feet. 

He still nods, given a second, swallowing as he saves his work. “Yeah, sure. It’s just—uh—you sure you don’t want me to stay down here?” he asks, and while Tony’s still struggling with facing the kid head-on—in his defense, it’s been less than eight hours—the uncertainty in his dark eyes is nothing short of endearing. 

Despite himself, Tony cracks a smile. “I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t want you,” he responds, which isn’t really a lie.

Tony’s taken the time to weigh his options and has come to the conclusion that the facility isn’t  _ that  _ big, and since he can’t morally exile Peter to the lab and a spare room, sooner or later, the three of them are bound to have a run in. It’s best if he’s there for it.

On the way out of the lab, he tosses a glance at Bruce, who still looks unsettled—a funny expression on his kind face, now blown up to mammoth proportions. “Keep up the good work, doc,” he encourages him, which roughly translates to  _ I’ll be fine _ — _ don’t worry about it. _

“This way, Underoos,” he says as the doors slide shut behind them, moving on ahead and towards the faint sounds of Morgan’s delight with her new stomping grounds.

Assumedly, as soon as Tony’s in Morgan’s line of sight, she propels herself into his arms with a shriek of joy, eyes for him and only him. He pretends to stumble back for the drama of it all, and he’s rewarded with the sparkle in her eyes once he clears all her hair from his line of sight. “Missed you too, Maguna. Been holding down the fort without me?”

She nods, a smile on her face. “We got to have a road trip! It took a really long time, but Mommy got a bunch of my clothes, and now we get to stay.”

Tony pretends to be shocked and looks to Pepper on instinct to see what he expects to be his twin expression, amusement and adoration written all over his face. Instead, she’s pale, eyeing the space next to Tony.

_ Oh,  _ he remembers.  _ Right. _

For a second, he’d forgotten why exactly Pepper had to suit their daughter up for an impromptu vacation.

(He’s also been known to forget that while it hurt him the most, he wasn’t the only one to watch Peter die.)

He angles Morgan away from Peter, a hand rising to card through her hair. “So, what has Mommy told you about why you had to drive for so long?” he asks, trying to stay upbeat.

He knows Morgan would’ve given him a lengthy explanation, but Peter apparently chooses that moment to try and slide past, bumping the counter in the process. At the sound, Morgan’s head swivels before Tony can think to stop her, and her eyes get as wide as saucers.

She looks back to Tony, as if for confirmation. “That’s Petey,” she whispers up at him, incredulous.

Peter, for his part, is gripping the counter so hard his knuckles shine white, mouth parted to take shallow, quick breaths that Tony finds evidence of in the fluctuations of his chest.

Obviously, Pepper didn’t go in-depth, not that he blames her. It’s a bit of a sticky situation to explain to an adult, let alone a child.

He nods. “It is,” he begins slowly, unsure of how she’s going to take it.

“But,” and here she leans in, as if telling a secret, “Mommy said not to talk about him and Spider-Man. I thought he went away.”

“He did,” he’s quick to assure her. “That’s why you talked about him to all those people, but he’s back now, just for a little. Fun, right?” He tries for a smile, not at all sure it’ll convince her, whip-smart as she is.

He can’t quite read what’s in her eyes as she stares at him, to Peter, and back again, and her silence is deafening. When she finally speaks, he’s dreading whatever she’ll have to say, for no other reason than kids, in Tony’s experience, always cut right to the heart of an issue, no matter how brutal it is on the adults in the room, but she just has a question: “Can Petey come to our tea party?”

Unsure where to go with that, he shoots Pepper a look. He’s relieved to see some of the tension gone out of her shoulders when she fills in the blank for him. “You pinky promised her. We brought the whole set along.”

Tony doesn’t know how he should answer, but the decision is out of his hands with Peter speaking up, the first thing he’s said since entering the kitchen. “Of course.” Tony can already see the grin spreading across her face. “What are big brothers for, right?” he tags on, easy as anything.

That right there—that’s the gut-punch Tony’s been waiting for. He just barely stops himself from stumbling back, cheeks aching as he flashes a toothless, tight smile. “Great,” he manages and bends forward to set Morgan down. “Go on ahead and show Peter your stuff. I’ll be with you guys in a second.”

Both he and Pepper watch as Morgan toddles over to Peter, and he beams, scooping her up and arranging her on his shoulders as she giggles.

“Ready for takeoff, Captain Morgan?”

It’s everything Tony ever dreamed of as they leave the room, and it must show as he looks to Pepper. He knows because when she tears her stare away from the doorway they disappeared into, her gaze is so soft with understanding Tony can hardly stomach it.

“It’s really him,” she breathes, hands fluttering around herself the way she does when she gets worked up. “I thought he’d look similar, not be a carbon copy.” She paces a little, and the movement sets Tony the tiniest bit on edge, not that he’d ever tell her.

“Bit of an experience for everyone,” he agrees, sitting. With Pepper, it’s easier. There’s someone he knows has his back, will catch him if he falls.

(He’s been falling since 10:16 that morning, recorded by FRIDAY to be the time of the energy surge.)

“Do you guys have a plan to send him back or—” She gestures, apparently lacking the words to describe what she’s thinking.

“In progress.”

They stare at one another, both at a loss as to how to describe how deeply, undeniably  _ unnerving  _ it is to see Peter up and about.

(Tony thinks of screaming to— _ at  _ Leigh about losing him, and Pepper thinks of the nightmares she has too about the boy she watched die in front of her, in her husband’s arms.)

With the balance they reach, Tony observes Pepper take a deep breath and nod, composed—outwardly, at least—once more, every bit the CEO she is. “Alright then,” she announces, mostly to herself. “You have a tea party to get to, and I need a vodka martini.”

“At least three olives,” Tony replies, lips tugged up with the memory.

She smiles, and Tony’s grounded, able to push off with a quick kiss on her cheek and towards the scene he knows is waiting for him.

(It isn’t until much,  _ much  _ later that he realizes he never told Peter Morgan’s name.)

//

Tony’s tea—Earl Grey and brewed in the Keurig—sloshes over the rim of his cup when Peter elbows his side. “Pinky up,” he hisses, eyes never leaving Morgan and her retelling of Disney’s Frozen, which is five minutes long and counting.

Tony thought it would hurt more, and beneath his equally enraptured exterior, there’s an ache, but the situation is so foreign from anything he was able to experience with his Peter, it’s not too bad.

“And Elsa’s in her castle, and the guards bust in, and the—um—her ceiling falls, and then Hans is there, but he’s bad—”

Tony shoots him a look in reply but does as instructed, wondering when this Peter gained knowledge of tea party etiquette. He reaches into the bowl in the middle of the blanket they’ve laid out over a section of the lawn, retrieving a Chips Ahoy—stale, but Morgan either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care.

As far as how he’s handling it, seeing Pepper forced him to cool down a bit, afraid of messing up, and while he should probably get to talking to Leigh about that, the ever-looming fear of failure is doing wonders to motivate him.

“So who’s your favorite—Elsa or Anna?” Peter asks, surprising Tony. He’s only half able to follow along to the explanation himself, but it’s been a long day. Peter’s eyeing her with a focus not unlike what he shows in the lab, single-minded but softer than the constant twitching of his fingertips, hammering in parts and reaching for new ones when he forgets his strength.

“Elsa,” Morgan replies instantly. “Her powers are super cool, and they—” Here she holds out her hands, fingers splayed, and makes a sound effect. “—like Mommy and Daddy. Spider-Man’s cooler than her though because he swings through the whole entire city, and she only has a castle.”

Tony watches Peter choke on his tea, coughing as he struggles to respond to that. “Yeah?” he croaks eventually, and Tony relates to his panic.

It took years for him to work up the nerve to tell her Spider-Man stories, and now, every time she mentions him—though she hasn’t since the last incident when Tony was still in the hospital—it still takes him back, a painful, in-his-face reminder of all he’s lost.

“Yep,” she carries on, oblivious. “And he’s sticky, so he can climb all over and not get caught. I was really sad you had to go,” she admits, sipping on her own drink—watered-down apple juice. She changes from talking  _ about  _ Spider-Man to talking  _ to  _ Peter in an instant, and Tony can see the kid struggle with it.

While Tony’s been having a rough time of the situation himself, when he thinks about it from Peter’s perspective, it doesn’t look much better. He’s around his mentor—graying, traumatized, a shadow of the self Peter likely knows—who can’t handle seeing him because he  _ died. _

(Tony’s come face to face with death enough times himself to know that it never gets easier, if not for the pain of it then the fear of what you stand to leave behind.)

He wants to interject, steer Morgan from the topic of conversation to something less cutting, but she’s rambling on anyway, only gotten more articulate as she’s grown. “You went, and Daddy got sad too, but it’s better now because you’re back!” She grins at this, and then her eyes land on Peter’s outstretched hand, widening to what would be a comically extent except that Tony can feel the situation careening wildly out of his control. “Can I climb on you?”

Tony documents Peter’s face as he processes, the wet sheen in his eyes he blinks away and the parting of his lips, as if taking in more air will slow the reality he’s being accosted with.

Tony cuts in to save him, knowing the feeling only too well. “Peter’s had a long day, baby. Maybe another time, alright? He’s going to be here for a while.” Solidifying his point, he finishes the last of his tea out of his Ariel-themed cup with a long, obnoxiously loud slurp. “Furthermore, I think our tea party needs to come to a close. It’s getting late, princess, and you haven’t had dinner.”

At Morgan’s put-out expression, Peter speaks, fortifying Tony’s admittedly weak defense against what he calls her puppy dog eyes. “Tomorrow,” he promises her with a wink. “Can’t do too much in one day, you know, makes you all sore when you’re old like your dad.”

The banter is so quick, impish and everything Peter was before it all went to shit, Tony scoffs, worries genuinely put out of his mind for the first time that day in offense. “You little—”

“Mr. Stark, there are children around,” he interrupts him, lips quirked smugly.

It’s the same confidence from the lab but without the orders, familiarity oozing from the way Peter leans back onto his arms, eyes sparking with a dare.

Tony glares at him—the smart ass—and reaches over, ruffling his hair, which doesn’t have nearly as much gel in it as his Peter’s had. He feels too light for the difference to make him sad, right now. Peter squawks in protest, batting at the attack, and Tony doesn’t think twice when he’s eventually following Morgan back inside, blanket over his shoulder, tea set boxed up and under his arm, and Peter clears his throat from behind him.

He turns to face him and finds Peter’s face the slightest bit ruddy, likely from the sun setting over the property. “I’m gonna’ stay out here for a while if you don’t mind,” he tells him. “I know you told Doctor Banner to take a break for the night, but if you, like, want me back in the lab, I can totally—”

“It’s fine, kid. You like stargazing?”

Peter stares at him for a second before nodding. “Yeah—yeah. It’s relaxing, you know?”

Tony doesn’t, actually, mostly because when he looks up at night he remembers the wormhole that opened in the dotted blackness, losing on a rust-colored planet countless miles from home, but he pretends because Peter wouldn’t know that. 

“Makes sense,” he replies, looking back towards the facility to hide any faults in his attempt at schooling his expression. “When you want to come back in, pick an entrance. FRIDAY should open up. If not, tell her to get me.”

Peter smiles, and Tony watches him clamber up to the roof with a pang, thinking of the telescope he bought for him on a whim, the hours he spent brushing up on his astronomy so he could help him with his homework.

He hurries back inside, head down, before the kid can dredge anything else up Tony would rather ignore and, like back in the lab, thinks nothing of the not-quite-right-ness of the interaction.

(Tony will never know the tears Peter sheds that night, a story or two above anyone who might ask why.)

//

In the weeks that come, Peter’s presence and the impermanence of it becomes one of Tony’s many background pains—no different than the occasional throbbing of his scars or the pangs rooted in the space where the arc reactor used to be. He has bad days, naturally, where he keeps his head down in the lab and they spend more time welding than what’s strictly necessary so Tony can focus on the sparks instead of Peter’s face, but those aren’t as frequent as the good ones.

The three of them and occasionally Rhodey, who’s the one other person Tony’s let in on everything because it’s  _ Rhodey,  _ start work early but finish usually before dinner, if only because Pepper yells at them if they’re not up to eat often enough for her liking.

_ “I don’t care about alternate universes, Tony. You and Peter were supposed to have a healthy work schedule then and still should now.” _

They haven’t told May.

She was part of the reason for the schedule, back then. After she found out about Spider-Man, she’d screamed for hours and hadn’t been hoarse by the time she stopped, nor had any of the flames leaping in the depths of her eyes—so like Peter’s, even if they weren’t technically related—been abated. Tony had been seated on their couch, Peter exiled to his room for the showdown, and May had ironed out the rules for him, all but using his face as her board.

“ _ Injury reports—curfew—safety features—” _

Tony listened, both because of the guilt festering in him for letting things get as bad as they did and because May Parker was and is terrifying.

He broached the subject with Peter, both of them elbow deep in the latest engine they were trying out with Bruce on break, only to have him freeze, nearly electrocuting Tony in the process.

“Don’t tell May,” he’d said— _ commanded _ —and it was one of the moments Tony has, at least a few a day, where Peter might as well throw him into the wall for the way it steals the breath from Tony’s chest, an achingly perfect imitation of the Peter he lost.

_ His hand webbed to the doorknob, eye aching, another step towards the fight that would tear his life apart— _

At Tony’s obvious not-okay-ness, Peter had mellowed a bit. “She doesn’t need to know. I can’t stay, anyway, so it’s better to let her keep moving on with her grief,” he’d explained, tone almost pleading.

(Tony, through the circumstances of the situation, is not afforded the same mercy, and on his bad days, when grease and soot are smeared on Peter’s face just so, he’s back to the end.)

Tony hasn’t brought it up again since. There hasn’t been much time, besides. Peter says it doesn’t matter how long it takes them to finish: if they do it right, it should function as something of a time machine too, sending him back to where he needs to be to fix the problem.

The first time he mentions it, a lightbulb goes off in Tony’s mind that he feels stupid for leaving dark so long:  _ time travel.  _ He’s done that before, and realizing that, things get a little easier. Even so, it’s Peter who really kicks things into gear, saying as they work, it’s easier to understand how Octavius applied her research from his universe.

Tony never does get around to seeing if she exists in his own timeline—if she’s brilliant enough to make a portal between dimensions, he thinks he’d have at least heard of her work—but he doesn’t doubt that Peter’s right, the little nerd. He knows for a fact he’s read all of his and Bruce’s work, multiple times. It’s hardly a stretch to imagine him reading up on his villain. As a matter of fact, he’s impressed with the kid for keeping his cool around Bruce—Doctor Banner, as he calls him, despite Bruce’s protests.

They get along well, in part due to the steady stream of chai tea—Bruce’s favorite—that Peter keeps sending his way. “Lucky guess,” he’d replied, hologram opened in front of him, when Tony asked how he’d known. “I like it, so I just made some for him too,” he’d tacked on, and then Tony had stopped caring because something blew up on the other side of the room.

It takes time, but they eventually have the framework of what they need set up. It’s a feat of engineering and quantum physics, which would be more impressive to Tony if Peter didn’t insist that its repeated use would tear their universe apart.

“It’s a lot smaller than the other one,” he comments, stepping around the skeleton of their final product. “Hers was, like, the size of a football field.”

“Yeah?” Tony replies, knocking back the last of his fourth coffee of the day. “Well, she’s not the three of us. ‘Sides, we’re only using it once.”

“I guess,” Peter hums, rapping his knuckles on the side experimentally. “We have to stop for a few days, right, to wait for more Starkium to get synthesized?”

Tony shakes his head, taking a step back himself to admire their handiwork. “Nope. Bruce and I did some extra calculations last night while you were busy losing at Candyland to a five-year-old. I have a few plants here and there that have some in reserves. Just transporting you, it should be enough. We can keep rolling.”

“Good news for you and me, Peter,” Bruce comments from over their shoulders. “With us already being radioactive, the isotope we’re using shouldn’t bother us significantly. Tony’ll have to go out of the room to be safe, but once we get it locked into the accelerator, we should be good to work again.”

“With any luck, you’ll be back home by the end of the week,” Tony tells him, smothering the part of him crying out in protest at the fact, screaming at him to pull the kid close and never let go.

He was never going to stay, Tony knows that, and he looks to Peter to distract himself from the sting of the reminder with his reaction, expecting joy, relief. He can’t imagine it’s fun to wander around knowing you’re dead, able to talk to all of five people as a result, none of them his family or friends. Instead, he finds him staring at the ground, expression what he’d call heartbroken if he didn’t know any better.

“Kid?” he prompts, nudging his side. “Why the long face?”

Peter jolts at the touch as if it were electric, waving his concerns off with the fakest smile Tony’s ever seen plastered across his face. “Oh, it’s nothing. I’m just gonna’ miss hanging out with you guys all day,” he obviously lies through his teeth. “Back to school and all that. Don’t worry about it, Mr. Stark. I’m really glad I had your guys’ help. It would’ve taken me forever to figure out on my own.”

In the moment, Tony lets it go, but that night, when it’s Pepper’s turn to put Morgan to bed and Burce has gone back to his room to do his other work, he suggests a movie night. Before, it always comforted him, and whatever reason he has to be sad about the accelerator’s completion, Tony figures he can wheedle it out of him with popcorn and Star Wars.

“It’ll be fun. We haven’t done anything together yet, and we’re running out of time.”

That they haven’t because Peter’s still afraid of setting him off goes unsaid.

“Sounds good,” he agrees, easier than Tony anticipated. He means to ask him about the incident in the lab, but they’re not fifteen minutes into Empire Strikes Back when Tony feels a weight fall onto his shoulder and realizes Peter’s asleep.

Every muscle in his body tenses. His Peter only did that towards the end of what time they had together, and Tony never knew how to handle it then, either. He’s warm, and Tony can feel his breath through the sleeve of his shirt.

(He considers it a morbid sort of luck that Peter died with his eyes open; otherwise, the scene wouldn’t be half as endearing.)

Pepper comes back in a few minutes later to find Tony gently running his fingers through Peter’s curls and decides not to say anything, slipping off to bed.

Tony doesn’t care about the movie, but he doesn’t want to wake Peter up and watches the rest of it anyway, arranging him across his lap somewhere along the way. He’d planned to get up and join Pepper, but FRIDAY must turn the lights off at some point because Tony doesn’t remember being tired but wakes up regardless on the couch, alone, to the sound of screaming.

It doesn’t register, at first. The facility’s quieter than the compound ever was, lacking the staff and other residents it always had on hand. He hasn’t gotten good sleep in a while and is still pretty out of it as the words reach his ears, loud even though they’re obviously coming from a different area of the facility.

“No, no—I didn’t get to say goodbye!”

_ Peter. _

As soon as he places the voice, he’s off like a shot, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes as he stumbles into the hallway. The sight that meets him is nothing short of entirely confusing, as Peter stands grappling with Steve.

At the airport, that was on some level, comprehensible. Now, it’s an old man wrestling an armful of thrashing, shrieking fifteen-year-old.

That one is, if it can be pinned on anyone, Tony’s fault. He told everyone they were welcome to the facility and forgot to amend that for the duration of Peter’s stay. Evidently, Steve got it in his mind to visit.

“Let me go!” Peter shouts, kicking, and without even seeing an obvious threat, the panic bleeding through his voice has the gauntlet Tony built into his arm humming on instinct. “I have to go back—I didn’t—I didn’t—”

“You need to calm down,” Steve tells him, grunting as Peter nearly breaks free. He might be elderly now, but Peter’s not thinking straight and can therefore be overpowered. 

“Kid, what’s the matter?” Tony asks, moving into the fray to try and disentangle him. He ignores the look Steve shoots him, the message in it— _ what the hell, Tony _ —clear. At Tony’s hands on his shoulders, Peter whips around, eyes wide, frantic.

“What? No— _ no,  _ you’re—”

He shakes his head, tears beginning to slip down his cheeks. “What did you do?” he spits, turning back to Steve. “S’ not possible, I  _ know  _ it’s not. Tony and May n’ everyone are gone—I had him back and I didn’t even get to say  _ goodbye _ ,” he repeats, inconsolable, and Tony’s lost as to what’s going through his mind.

“Kid— _ Peter _ , I’m right here. You can’t see May, but she’s safe. We’re getting you home, remember?”

He’s stopped fighting, facing him again. “But Steve—he’s here and—”   
  


“I know, trust me. Just calm down, alright? Can you do that for me?” Then, lower. “Rogers, help me get him to the couch.”

Even well over half a century older than he saw him last, he knows damn well that Steve’s got his enhancements going for him. The two of them are able to support Peter’s weight until he can collapse onto something other than the floor, and the moment he’s let go, he curls himself up tight, chest still heaving.

“What’s going on?” Steve hisses, and it’s interesting _ ,  _ to say the least, to see the same voice, maybe a bit more weathered but still  _ Steve,  _ coming from such an old body.

“I’ll explain later,” Tony mutters back. “Go somewhere—anywhere—else, please. I’ll be in later.”

Steve stares at him, long and hard, but does as asked, slipping from the room easily and leaving Tony and Peter alone.

Tony eyes Peter’s fingers nestled in his own hair, grasping the faint curls there and tugging in a motion that Tony can only imagine is painful. He sits down on the other end of the couch, and eventually, Peter looks up at him, eyes red and swollen with tears.

“Hey,” Tony greets, softer than he thinks he’s ever been with him. “Want to tell me what that was about?”

It’s Tony who’s the mess, normally, stepping out of the lab for breaks or tense enough to prompt Pepper to call him to her under the guise of helping with SI. The entire morning is the blow he never saw coming, a bomb only activated when one toes it into action.

Peter shakes his head. “It’s not a big deal,” he rasps, lying again. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll be leaving soon, anyway. Just give me to my Tony to handle. It’s not a big deal.”

“Correct me if I’m wrong here, but back in the hall, didn’t you just say—”

“It’s fine,” Peter cuts him off. He’s not looking down, exactly, but he doesn’t meet Tony’s eyes, gaze lost somewhere past his knees, folded to his chest, and before Tony’s thighs. “I just freaked out a little when I saw Steve. You don’t need to worry about it.”

He tries for a smile, and it’s even more pitiful than the one he offered up the day before.

“What’s going on?” Tony presses, not willing to drop it the second time around. In the back of his mind, he’s known something’s different about this Peter, more than not having fought Thanos, more than being under the stress of a different universe.

Silence.

“Kid.” He’s not quite pleading, but it wouldn’t surprise Tony if that’s what he has to resort to. He didn’t beg him to stay back then—either time, actually—but he’s been given the opportunity to change things.

Peter shudders with a hoarse sob Tony can tell he tries to stifle, and he inches closer, unsure of how to comfort him. “You wouldn’t get it,” he murmurs at last, and the hurt, raw and bleeding in his voice, reaches out and puts Tony’s heart in a vice.

“Run it past me,” he offers, brows knitted together as his brain works, trying desperately to piece together what could be wrong with this Peter.

“I can’t,” he whispers, voice cracking on another sob. “Cause you’re gonna’ try to fix it, and you  _ can’t.  _ I know you can’t, and neither can Bruce, or even anybody in Wakanda. Just let it go and send me back home,  _ please.  _ It’ll be easier.”

_ Wakanda? _

How did Tony get here, not understanding most of what’s coming out of Peter’s mouth? Just yesterday, they were on stable ground. He doesn’t understand what’s changed, but it all comes back to the screaming, to Steve.

_ Why had he called him Steve when Bruce, a man he’d been working with for over three weeks, is still Doctor Banner, when he’s Mr. Stark? _

He reaches out, and with a kind of reaction time Tony can only chalk up to instinct, Peter takes his hand, the squeeze he gives it just shy of painful.

“Kid, you can’t be sure. I get it, things are rough—”

“You  _ don’t  _ get it,” Peter snaps. “And I am sure because, in my universe, you tried. You  _ failed,  _ and I had to live with it.” 

The words are cutting but lack malice, nothing but Peter’s pain sharpening them into blades.

Tony still thinks of the snap that was only supposed to take him and how many nights he’s laid awake, turning over his countless ideas of how he’d change it if he ever got the chance.

This is it.

“Let me get it. Just tell me, kid, and I can pick up where your version of me left off.  _ Trust me,  _ please.”

There’s a long, long second then where Peter doesn’t say anything, eyes searching Tony’s face for something Tony’s not at all sure he has. At the end of it, he buries his head in his hands, taking a deep breath before he can look up again, expression gouged and terribly, undeniably  _ sad. _

His next words clearly embarrass him, though in the scheme of things, the request is small.

“Can I—could you hug me?” he asks, and Tony, giving in to the urge he’s felt ever since he got a second chance at goodbye, tugs him into his chest, knees knocking, heartbeats off sync. It doesn’t even matter because Peter’s  _ there,  _ warm and alive and  _ safe. _

The kid grips him like he’s the only thing keeping him tethered in their dimension, just the right height to tuck his chin over Tony’s shoulder, not that either of them would admit how comforting that feels. The ensuing quiet feels extended but only lasts a moment or two, during which Tony relearns how Peter feels wrapped up in his arms— _ strong shoulders, fingers clenching his shirt— _

Whatever Tony was expecting to come out of the embrace, it’s not what Peter eventually whispers—nearly sobs—like the world’s most sacred confession: “What would you do if I told you I’m not fifteen?”

And so it goes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> lmao so I feel like now would be a good time to mention this entire fic came from me seeing a few clips of the movie the Age of Adaline. Also as a heads up, next week's chapter might be up Sunday instead of Friday for Reasons but until then!! thanks to those of you who commented on last chapter, you guys were super sweet and got me pumped to post this one and see all of you later!
> 
> -
> 
> Hi! If you couldn't tell, this fic is going to be something of a wild ride, but I have good news: it's entirely pre-written. That being said, updates will be weekly—on Fridays, to be specific—and I'm beyond excited to finally share this project, which has been in the works since June. With that in mind, be sure to read beginning notes if they're present; in upcoming chapters, they'll have trigger warnings.
> 
> While we're here, there are a few things this fic ignores: Tom Holland’s height according to Google, the actual MCU timeline, the location of Tony’s lil cabin in the woods, and more, I’m sure. Elements of the idea of a particle accelerator as well as Doc Oc as presented in Into the Spider-Verse are also explored in this fic, but they don’t adhere to the same rules, so that’s something to be aware of too. Why are these things ignored? Plot convenience and also because I say so.
> 
> If you liked what you read, kudos and comments are always appreciated! Thanks for stopping by, and if you want to yell at me about this fic or anything else that strikes your fancy, I have a Marvel-only blog that can be found [here!](https://ambivalentmarvel.tumblr.com)
> 
> Edit: Updates are now on Sundays!


	4. IV

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw: domestic violence, heavy discussion of death and grief, descriptions of violence

It begins on the beach, homecoming night, not that Peter, a universe away from the version of himself that died more than once in his mentor’s arms, knows it.

Every part of his body aches, and he’s fifteen and dumb and tries to warn Toomes instead of getting himself the hell away from the inevitable fall out of the wings lifting him precariously,  _ dangerously _ into the air.

“I’m trying to save you!” he yells, though it hurts to move, speak,  _ breathe. _

Peter will check, later in his life, and find that Toomes lived to be good and old—released early from prison on good behavior and never convicted of another crime. He’ll spend much longer than that quick search wondering what might’ve happened if he’d run.

When the wings explode—across universes, Toomes rarely escapes—Peter throws himself down— _ sand in his teeth, gritty and mixing with the metallic tang of blood _ —but not fast enough.

Exactly four pieces of shrapnel end up in his back.

The first two hurt like hell but don’t hit anything vital, and Peter counts them along with the rest as his ears ring for the second time in under ten minutes. The third is trickier, lodged in his side and cutting through the edges of a major organ or two, but the fourth is the kicker, driven into one of his lungs. If he had been anyone else, Peter would’ve bled out on the beach, Toomes would’ve fallen victim to the ensuing fire, and Tony Stark would’ve grieved Spider-Man and blamed himself for letting him die.

(That version of Tony does blame himself, later, but for the opposite reason and until his dying breath.)

Instead of keeling over, however, Peter—bullheaded, young Peter—pulls Toomes from the flames and webs his way to the top of one of Coney Island’s roller coasters, vision spotty and breaths only barely cycling through his chest. It’s perched on the rickety white wood that he removes the metal from his body, only aware as the world spins around him that it’s hurting him and he wants it gone, all first aid knowledge long wiped from his blurry mind. The pieces clatter somewhere to the ground below, and following said decision that would have any medical professional screaming in protest, there are approximately two minutes where Peter’s heart stops beating.

As far as Peter remembers until he analyzes the night years later, that time is spent passed out from a mixture of pain and exhaustion.

When the two minutes are up, Peter’s eyes open again, and after a while of catching his breath, during which he hunches over and tries not to scream, he swings home to nurse himself back to health in the dingy bathroom of the apartment he shares with May.

In the coming weeks, his wounds close—no scars to be found, though he wakes up on occasion gasping from a phantom pain—and he tells his Mr. Stark that he’d rather stay on the ground for a while longer.

Impressed, Tony decides the kid’s so-called internship should have some merit, and Peter comes down to the compound Tuesday nights and the third Saturday of every month—like clockwork.

Aside from lab time with Tony—still referred to as Mr. Stark unless he really needs his attention, no matter how he complains—Peter considers there to be two other major developments throughout the rest of his time in high school, Spider-Man’s usual routine with crimefighting aside.

The first happens in his junior year: the official pardoning of the rogue Avengers, which Peter is more involved in than he could’ve ever imagined when Tony showed up at his doorstep to tease him about his suit and recruit him to fight at the airport.

He’s there when the first of them—Captain America, Black Widow, and Falcon—arrive in the compound, stationed firmly at Tony’s hip despite not necessarily being invited. 

“It’s gonna’ be a mess, kid, nothing for you to be involved in,” Tony had told him a few weeks prior.

“I have to apologize to Falcon for webbing him up at the airport,” he’d argued. “And I stole Cap’s shield—not cool, you know? I need to make amends as soon as possible if we’re going to be fighting together.”

Peter is full of shit and does none of that, not that Tony ever mentions it.

(Tony doesn’t need to ask for Peter to offer himself up—however subtly—as moral support, and perhaps more importantly, Tony never needs to know that Peter hears his heart pick up when Captain America enters the room for a good three months after he comes back.)

He waves them in when he sees Tony’s hands clasp—white-knuckled—behind his back despite his own reservations, suffusing the tension in the air with the first of many light cracks at Falcon and Captain America.

_ “So, you guys still getting beat up by Spider-Man these days?” _

Black Widow, he doesn’t have the balls to joke with, but in a weird way, he’s the least worried about her, watching her fall into familiar step with Tony, asking about Pepper, SI too.

Before the school year’s through, they’ll know his identity and become Sam, Steve, and Natasha, along with Bucky, Wanda, and Clint, and even T’Challa, Shuri, Bruce, and Thor, almost all of whom ruffle his hair and make fun of his baby face.

It’s at his graduation—grin splitting his face, the cheers he receives when he walks across the stage the loudest of his whole class—that Tony leans in during their hug and whispers the second in his ear.

_ “You’re gonna’ be a great big brother, know that?” _

Peter’s eyes get big, and he nearly knocks Tony over in his ensuing excitement. There’s so many of them—May, Tony, Happy, Rhodey, Steve, Natasha, and  _ more _ —come to see him, it’s a little ridiculous, a veritable flock of Peter’s superheroes, powers or no, with him in the center, and he couldn’t be happier.

They all go for shawarma, and Peter wonders how he got lucky enough to have his graduation be celebrated the same way as victory over an alien invasion.

(This Peter will never know the name Thanos, struck down with his fleets at Xandar by Carol Danvers, who receives the Nova Corps’ distress call in the nick of time.)

That summer, Spider-Man is given a medal from New York City’s mayor for his work, and Tony has a drone flying overhead snap a picture that both he and May get framed for their respective mantels.

He ends up going to MIT, to Tony and Rhodey’s satisfaction, and it’s in college that Peter tries his hand at dating—first a boy, then a girl. The girl’s not as nice, but nobody knows that but Peter because she’s an angel in public, tinier than he is and full of sugar-sweet smiles. When they’re alone, she yells at him for things Peter didn’t think were a big deal— _ “Quit leaving your shit all over,” _ or  _ “Could you pay some attention to me?” _ spat while he’s studying—which hurts Peter’s ears. When she gets mad or drunk and especially when she’s both, she hits him— _ “Who do you think you are—don’t try and cut me off,” _ as he tries to put her wine bottle away—which just hurts.   
  


He could try and dodge—or heaven forbid,  _ defend himself _ —he has the reflexes for it, but he never does.

(He’ll never admit it, but he’s worried not landing a blow the first time will just work her up more.)

  
He tries not to think about why he’s always so happy to be going home every few weekends to be Spider-Man, and no amount of screaming about date nights ever changes his leaving.   
  
It’s after one bad night, with a vase thrown and her acrylics sunk into his cheek not a half hour previous, that Peter stares into a mirror, twenty and tired but trying to make it work because when she’s not angry, she honestly is amazing. He goes to scrub the blood off his face and get some butterfly bandages on it when suddenly he’s fifteen again, fresh out from under metal talons and burning sand and licking his wounds in his tiny bathroom.   
  
He ends up on the floor, shaking and pale, and when he gets up to meet his reflection, it suddenly looks like nothing’s changed.   
  
May’s always called him a late bloomer, waiting for the last growth spurt to kick in, for his dark eyes to look less puppy-ish and more mature. It’s the same face from homecoming—eye black, skin cut—staring back out from the glass. Fear grips him then, but he tells himself it’s not possible. He’s Peter, he’s five years older than he was then, and he’s fine.   
  
(Peter leaves her after eighteen months of dating and too many bruises to count because Tony surprises him with a visit—leaving no time for concealer or to clean the shards of glass from his kitchen floor—and knocks some sense into him.)

Peter doesn’t date from then on out and eventually for more reasons than the fear that grips him when he thinks about leaving himself that vulnerable again, and while Tony still side eyes him sometimes when he asks if there’s anyone new in the picture, the lack of a significant other leaves him with a lot of free time, most notably during the summer. During college, those take him back to Queens, where people cheer his name and none of it matters like Morgan’s smile as she toddles out of the lakeside cabin and into his waiting arms.

“You’re getting so big,” he tells her over tea parties, and she taps his pinky as a reminder to put it up before responding.

“Not as big as Uncle Bruce,” she replies, slurping her apple juice with a certain joy that only comes with too-sticky air and the possibilities of being four. “He came last weekend with Uncle Steve, and I got to sit in his shield.”

“Maybe you’ll be the next Captain America,” he responds, and the nickname comes to him with a grin, ready to stick for the rest of her life. “What do you say, Captain Morgan?” he teases, and she’s so entertained by the idea she’s giggling for hours, throwing a frisbee back and forth and telling Peter he has to be the bad guy so she can take him down, not that he minds.

“What are big brothers for, right?” he assures Tony over lunch when he asks how he’s holding up, happy to be loved even at the expense of hours of make-believe in the sun.

His college graduation is even more boisterous than his high school, with a bar Tony rents out for the night and Thor’s present of way too much Asgardian mead, the only thing that gets Peter—and everyone else enhanced that shows—drunk. The picture they take from the party lacks a cap and gown and involves May kissing Happy’s cheek from where he has her in a bridal carry, but the two of them are the first thing Peter compares when, twenty-four and thrown through several windows and half a building, he finds himself in the bathroom again, this time in his penthouse, back in the city.

Like before, he’s struck by the way he appears to have stayed in place despite all he knows he’s done. Last time, it was a prickling fear he managed to shove down, but now it’s torrential, occupying his every thought until he pulls the pictures up on his phone in an attempt to wave off the worry as paranoia.

“I look different,” he says aloud, hoping that doing so will make it more convincing. “I look older,” he continues with the same logic.

(It doesn’t work.)

He’s had the odd modification here and there—a new haircut from a different barber, clothes Tony picks out for him because he says he can’t handle seeing any more science puns—but his face is still the same, no matter how hard he tries to pretend otherwise. He reasons, weakly, that maybe he got all of his growth—facially, anyway—out of the way by the time he was a senior, but when he texts May asking for whatever school pictures she can give him, any changing balks in his sophomore year.

He has Karen check what Tony has on record for his height, weight.

“ _ You sound distressed, Peter. Would you like me to call Mr. Stark?” _

_ “No—no, I’m good.” _

His height’s never changed— _ 5’5”— _ and any fluctuations in his weight aren’t significant. As he looks at more pictures—frantic, pulling them up on holograms and swiping them away the second they align with his horrifying, quickly forming hypothesis—it becomes clear that Peter’s aging process is nine years behind schedule.

Peter ends the night flopped on top of his bed—white covers getting rusty with blood from injuries he’s yet to properly treat—heart pounding.

_ Not possible, not possible, not possible. _

(Peter has always done the impossible, from stopping cars with his bare hands to convincing Tony Stark he’d be a good dad.)

He shows up at the compound the next day—Stark Industries is a very forgiving employer, in Peter’s case—knowing Bruce is there doing research and offering himself up as a new test subject.

He wants desperately to be proven wrong.

_ No, no, no, no, no— _

Peter is twenty-six when he is officially diagnosed with a never before seen and virtually unexplainable telomeric condition, thirty when the best minds in the world—Bruce Banner, Helen Cho, and Shuri Udaku, to name a few _ — _ declare it incurable.

Tony’s the one to tell him, creeping into his room at the compound. The Star Wars posters are gone now, though a few action figures remain tucked behind other decorations on a shelf, and the second he catches sight of Tony’s face, coupled with several weeks of radio silence from the med team, he knows.

He pretends all is well anyway, straightening up from his spot with one of the many papers he’s read in the past few years, from those on experimental research to in-depth examinations of Medieval medical practices. “Hey,” he greets, and his voice wobbles on the word.

(Peter will eventually become much better at thinking on his feet, at putting on a brave face and lying in general. He never masters the art of doing so to Tony.)

He’s fifteen years older than he was, but his body still has a teenager’s hormones going through his head after Tony finally tells him the truth. 

_ “They’re saying trying to fix it would kill you _ — _ it’s wired into your genes _ —”

He sends Tony out—a polite but quavering smile, “ _ Could you give me a second?” _ —and sobs into his pillow for the rest of the night.

He’s had plenty of time to think about the implications of his condition, the people he’ll outlive, the parts of life he’ll never have—children, marriage—and he’d still held out hope, stupidly, that maybe it would all work out.

Tony is still there when he visits the cabin and wakes up screaming, convinced everyone he loves has died and left him to fend for himself, and it’s with him that Peter learns through experience both what a panic attack is and how to work somebody through one.

“ _ Follow me. Breathe in _ — _ we have time _ — _ and breath out _ — _ May’s just in Queens, wanna’ call her?” _

It’s on the same visit when, with Morgan gone to the city with Happy to give them a day alone, they get a call from him saying someone messed with the car; it flipped and he’s fine but Morgan’s—

_ Gone. _

Peter and Tony spend the next twenty-four hours scouring every possible resource for clues to her location and have her checked into a hospital in thirty-six.

(Nobody will ever see the camera feed from the building she was held in, the utterly terrifying footage of Spider-Man tearing his way through a crime ring with unprecedented brutality to hold a twelve-year-old girl—dirty, scared, and crying—who calls him  _ Petey.) _

_ “What are big brothers for, right?” _

It occurs to Peter, afterward, that he’s a target too, an intern and employee unusually close to Tony Stark, and he decides to hide the relationship before another kidnapper does their research too well.

He’s thirty-two when he, with Tony’s help, fakes his death and begins again with a new identity.

He doesn’t go many places—the store, meals with May or a friend—but it keeps CPS off his back, along with anyone else, whether they want to get to Tony or not, who might want a piece of a kid who’s been fifteen seventeen years too long. His age on his new documents—eighteen—allows for him to control his own life, at least, and Tony sets him up with a fund to give him a boost as he works for SI’s R&D from the compound or his penthouse. Even then, work only distracts him for so long, and he ends up thinking a lot about what the team studying him collectively decided the cause of the mutation was: an overactive healing factor. At the time, finding a catalyst hadn’t been half as important as a cure, but with the possibility of eternity stretched out in front of him, Peter wants to know more.

It comes to him one night, running simulations for his latest invention from the hologram projector built into his kitchen table, so startling that he accidentally deletes part of the code he’s writing.

Peter only came close to death one time when he was actually fifteen.

_ The beach—the blowback from the explosion. _

Peter finds himself in front of a mirror, as he always seems to be when it’s important, tracing his fingers over where he thinks the shrapnel pierced his skin—four pieces of metal for a man who tried to kill him and a lifetime ruined because of them.

Peter will never technically have evidence, but he knows with unwavering, unquestionable certainty regardless that he died that night. He knows that without the Stark suit, his backup the second he lost contact with Ned was nonexistent. He knows that as a result, his own body went too far trying to save him.

He was fifteen and stubborn and just trying to do the right thing, and he pays for it.

The first thing Peter loses isn’t a death so much as a retirement; people start to whisper about when Spider-Man will grow too old to continue. All the original Avengers and half a dozen more have said their goodbyes by then, and Peter is terrified that despite the fake identities he creates for himself every decade or so, someone will connect the dots.

(He dreams of lab tables and scalpels, scientists dissecting him while he’s still breathing to understand what keeps his clock ticking.)

He holds out years longer than he should before he makes a video wishing New York well.

_ “Thank you for letting me serve you, and best of luck to the next generation from your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.” _

By the end, there are tears in his eyes under the mask, and he spends that night on the phone with Tony, talking until the lump in his throat dissolves and he can watch his creation without crying. It helps that he puts his suits in storage—out of sight, out of mind—and starts wearing black instead to pick up where his alias left off—anonymous in his reincarnation.

“I’m in mourning,” he jokes when May comments on the new color scheme, and she hits his arm with the towel she’s using to dry the dishes.

(Given time, it’s not nearly as funny.)

Peter’s circle of people he loves grows smaller over the years, but he stays in contact with Ned and MJ. He’s invited to both of their weddings—safely before he finds out his  _ condition  _ is permanent and thus able to be stomached—sees them with their wives, and cries under the guise of being a family friend on the younger side.

He gets breakfast with Ned and hears about the kids he has that Peter can’t meet.

(How do you explain to any child that’s not Morgan Stark—just a few years short of how Peter appears when her parents sat her down and explained that she’d likely outgrow her big brother—why your best friend hasn’t aged?)

He does lunch with MJ and sees pictures of the cats she has that he can, and the gentle way their faces round and wrinkles accumulate in the corners of their eyes don’t remotely prepare him for when he gets a call from Pepper, tears choking her voice.

_ “It’s his heart, honey.” _

Peter is forty-five and still not ready for the last three days he spends with Tony, jammed with the rest of his family into his room in the medical wing of the compound. He’s the only one who gets a warning before the monitor lets out a long, jarring beep—a shock at the base of his spine that bends him double in pain.

He stares through tears at the peaceful picture Tony makes, tucked into glaringly white sheets like he’s only sleeping.

That first time, he’s not alone. He watches tears slip down Pepper’s cheeks, wraps Morgan up in a hug—twenty-seven and forever his little sister—at the funeral despite his own pain and the several inches she has on him.

(What Peter can’t say at the public one, he makes up for in his private eulogy, sending everyone not already crying into tears.)

“It gets better,” he promises her afterward, speaking from how it went with his parents, Ben. “You’ve got this, Captain,” he tacks on, and she finally cracks a watery smile, eyes so like Tony’s crinkling with it.

“I’m glad you’re here,” she replies, and Pepper and May join them that night to watch the stupid home videos FRIDAY still has on her server, the AI extricated from SI years ago and charged with protecting the Stark family.

It’s soothing, but there aren’t enough recordings in the world to heal the hole that starts forming in Peter with every death that seems to happen exponentially faster.

_ Happy, Bruce, Sam, Wanda, Pepper _ —

May.

Peter is fifty-nine, but Ned and MJ still cringe to walk into his penthouse to find him on the couch with a bottle of mead.

“Hey,” MJ starts, and Peter’s head lolls to the side to stare blankly at her, Ned hanging back a bit. 

(They both have a healthy dose of silver threaded through their dark hair.)

“Hey,” he croaks back, and sandwiched between them and wrapped in as many blankets as they can find, he discovers he’s nearly forgotten what it’s like to have someone hold him. It doesn’t mean he lets them take the mead with them when they inevitably have to go.

“It’s just to take the edge off,” he swears, and despite the cliche, polishes the rest of it off and stops.

(No matter how many people he loses, he’ll never forget all the terrible possibilities that come with wanting a drink too badly, with a bottle of wine downed years ago that landed him in the goddamn bathroom in the first place.)

Back when the idea of the grief he now shoulders was just a premonition, Peter hoped it would get easier as it went, and to an extent, some of it isn’t as bad as it could be. There are a few decades— _ Bucky, Rhodey, Natasha, Clint _ —where the pain is still there, but it’s not overwhelming. Steve—aging, just a tad slower than what’s natural and still making regular use of the compound’s training grounds—is there with him along with Thor, who comes from New Asgard, barely changed but even then, still more different than Peter.

The first time Peter feels well and truly alone is at MJ’s funeral, eighteen months after Ned’s and both a result of cancer caught too late, head bowed and sunglasses obscuring his face.

(Steve and Thor don’t know a girl—woman, now—from Queens, and nobody knows that the boy standing off to the side is eighty himself and wishing, for the millionth time, to just  _ be with  _ them all again, breathing and happy to see him.)

He’s been through nine identities by the time humanity rings in the new century, not including that of Peter Parker, and though the world around him gets darker with no one to love, Morgan remains a beacon through it all.

She’s brilliant, spearheading her parents’ company into the new age with the perfect amount of her father’s flair and mother’s class, all of the above passed down to her descendants in turn. Even retired, she stays busy, and still all Peter has to do is ask for her to clear her schedule for lunch.

“R&D still hasn’t stopped bothering me about where I’m getting all of your blueprints, you know. You’d think handing a Fortune 500 off to your kid would do the trick,” she grouses.

“Imagine that,” he teases, taking a bite of his meal, steaming deliciously from the ever-persistent Burger King. “But really, any word on the company? I know stock—”   
  


“I don’t want to talk about that.  _ Bo-ring.  _ He’ll figure it out, I’m sure, _ ”  _ she waves him off.

_ _

It stings, a perfect imitation of Tony, but Peter’s gotten better at masking his feelings. If he hadn’t, he’d be a mess every time he sees an Avengers tribute. Besides, he tries not to make Morgan think about things like that, so he simply shakes his head, rolling his eyes. She ignores him, aged beautifully like her mother and just as good at pushing past whatever’s in her way.

“I want to talk about your birthday,” she whispers conspiratorially, leaning in and lowering her voice as if anyone at a fast food restaurant is going to care about what they perceive as grandmother and son, and Peter quirks a brow.

She scoffs, somehow managing to look as put out as she did when she was twelve and he told her he would tell Tony and Pepper if she started superheroing anytime before the age of fourteen.

_ “Speaking as someone who was a teenage superhero, you’ll have enough problems. Don’t push it to tween, yeah?” _

“You’re going to be a  _ hundred,”  _ she complains. “It’s not an everyday thing.”

“I don’t like birthdays,” he shoots back evenly. “I’ve had way too many.”

“This one’s special—”

And the argument pings across their table and through their burgers until Peter eventually gives in, unable to ultimately deny her anything that has her so excited.

(Looking at her head of feathery, snow-white hair, he doesn’t know how many more chances he’s going to get to make her happy.)

Morgan and her light are snuffed out when Peter is one hundred and two. He doesn’t get a call like what happened with Tony. Instead, it hits him head-on during a walk through the city, strung up on a billboard for millions to see.

_ BREAKING: MORGAN STARK FOUND DEAD IN FAMILY HOME—DEVELOPING _

He’ll later read and find that it was a stroke in her sleep, that no one saw it coming until it was too late, but Peter sinks to his knees then and there, a roadblock for the people of New York to step around like a mere inconvenience.

Her children have never heard of him before he shows up in her will as the recipient of no less than a billion dollars and the first of her many suits, a project he helped her with under Tony’s nose.

_ “If I could do it in spandex, she can do it in a suit of armor. Trust her, Mr. Stark.” _

The latter is personally delivered to him by a man with eyes the same shade as Pepper’s and hair as dark as his mother’s. “My mom said this was supposed to go to the man living at this address,” he tells him. Peter takes the mass of tech he’s struggling to carry like it’s nothing, ignoring the furrow that forms between the stranger’s brows.

“She would,” he agrees, already turning away. “Thank—”   
  


“Wait!” 

Peter finds the word surprisingly frantic coming from the CEO of Stark Industries, even if he shares his name, and he indulges him. “Something else you need?” he asks, more than ready to return to his bed, which he hasn’t left in approximately four days upon realizing he never told her a proper goodbye.

“Who are you?” Peter Stark asks him, and he may be middle-aged, his face half someone Peter’s only ever seen from a distance, but he’s part Morgan. That’s enough to make him question how he responds.

He pauses, taking in the other Peter, and figures what the hell, it’s the truth. What does he have to lose, anyway?

Thor has taken back to the stars, and Peter visits Steve every Friday in his home when he thinks he can handle it. Without Morgan, he has virtually no one.

He’s still one hundred and two when he reveals a fraction of the burden he bears for the first time in decades. “Her brother,” he deadpans. “Thanks for the suit. It means a lot.”

And then he slams the door in his face, unable to stand looking at all that he’s lost for even a second longer.

He doesn’t pick up any of the phone calls sent his way after that, nor does he open the door when the man shows up time and time again. He made the decision a long time and too many funerals ago to not get close to anyone new, not when their relationship would dissolve into visits to their gravestone to leave new flowers.

“Morgan’s kid won’t stop trying to talk to me,” he complains to Steve on one of his visits, mostly because while he appreciates talking to him, he knows he’ll forget and therefore won’t hold it over his head when he inevitably doesn’t follow his advice.

“Why don’t you let him?” he asks, shuffling forward. The aides at the home always smile at Peter, happy to see who they assume is coming in as a volunteer. 

He waves at one, other arm bracing Steve as he does so. “I’m not going anywhere, but he will. It’s easier to be alone, you know? Less to worry about missing.”

Steve rolls his eyes. “You should start going out again, meeting people.”

“You’re the only person as old as me,” Peter reminds him. “I don’t have a lot of options for people to talk freely to.”

“You could _ .  _ Start with him. You won’t even have put in the work to seek him out if he really wants to talk to you.”

Peter sighs, but it lacks heat. “Keep bothering me, and I’m not visiting anymore,” he grumbles, and with the argument that goads Steve into, he drops the subject.

Peter’s bluffing, of course. Steve is the only person he can talk to anymore, even if he is always trying to push him into one thing or another he thinks will be good for him. He’s physically thirteen years older than Peter’s technical age, but the serum keeps him going.

(When he can’t sleep, which is more often than what Tony or May would’ve been okay with in their lifetimes, Peter lays on his bed and wonders when all of Steve’s enhancements will give out.)

“Get a life, and you won’t need to,” Steve shoots back, and sitting there ribbing each other, it’s easy to forget that their connection’s cut with the revolving doors of the home, that he’ll go back to his same penthouse—empty, empty,  _ empty. _

With nobody to consistently see and, more notably, nobody watching him to tell him to dial it back, he pours his efforts into his activities as not-Spider-Man. 

With more than enough resources and a ridiculous amount of money to pour into it, he’s more active than he ever was as Spider-Man, a shadow in corners and back alleys to do everything he used to get medals for. The webs stay—articles speculate about someone picking up Spider-Man’s torch—as well as the anonymity, but nowadays, Peter doesn’t talk so much.

(He can’t have people wondering why a vigilante nobody ever sees speaks like their grandfathers, as much as Peter tries to modernize.)

He misses Spider-Man so much it hurts— _ lab days with Mr. Stark, May’s anger when she found out _ —but being nameless is supposed to be something of an advantage when he finds a trail of inexplicable seismic activity and villains he defeated decades ago that lead him to the lab of Doctor Olivia Octavius, quantum physics legend and batshit crazy if the explanations of her work she spouts to her dodgy assistants are anything to go by. The assistants go in and out, looking just as uncomfortable around their boss and her casual mentions of the damage she’s doing to space-time as Peter feels. In the black of his suit—enhanced with cloaking technology—she alone never sees him coming, and as a result, has no compunctions about flipping the switch on her invention as Peter hovers above it, trying to decide how to go about its dismantling.

The stinging at the base of his spine is a beat too late to be helpful, and Peter is falling, warping, twisting into something new and spat onto a floor so white the first thing it reminds him of is the sheets on Tony’s bed when he—

_ No. Not right now. _

“Fuck, that hurt,” he groans and, shortly after, becomes aware that he is not alone and, furthermore, is light years and an alternate dimension away from where he should be.

_ Mumbling he can’t make out leading him to a Tony with a scarred face and a metal arm—sadder and older but  _ there  _ on the ground, looking like he’s seen a ghost. _

Peter Parker is one hundred and twelve when he comes face to face with a man he watched die over half a century earlier and accepts approximately ten minutes afterward that the universe won’t be kind enough to let him stay with him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> other peter’s story!! voila!! this was my favorite chapter to write for,, so many reasons, and I hope you guys like it too! However, I understand it explores a lot of heavy topics, so if anyone feels that the trigger warnings I put in the beginning notes aren't adequate, _please_ let me know so that I can update them.
> 
> -
> 
> Hi! If you couldn't tell, this fic is going to be something of a wild ride, but I have good news: it's entirely pre-written. That being said, updates will be weekly—on Fridays, to be specific—and I'm beyond excited to finally share this project, which has been in the works since June. With that in mind, be sure to read beginning notes if they're present; in upcoming chapters, they'll have trigger warnings.
> 
> While we're here, there are a few things this fic ignores: Tom Holland’s height according to Google, the actual MCU timeline, the location of Tony’s lil cabin in the woods, and more, I’m sure. Elements of the idea of a particle accelerator as well as Doc Oc as presented in Into the Spider-Verse are also explored in this fic, but they don’t adhere to the same rules, so that’s something to be aware of too. Why are these things ignored? Plot convenience and also because I say so.
> 
> If you liked what you read, kudos and comments are always appreciated! Thanks for stopping by, and if you want to yell at me about this fic or anything else that strikes your fancy, I have a Marvel-only blog that can be found [here!](https://ambivalentmarvel.tumblr.com)
> 
> Edit: Updates are now on Sundays!


	5. V

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw: vomit mention

Peter can see in Tony’s eyes that he’s not following, and part of him wants to keep him that way. If he doesn’t explain, there’s less room for Tony to freak out, like he knows he did back then.

He’s staring, and despite the eye contact, his expression is just the tiniest bit vacant, something Peter knows is telling of the way he’s privately trying to outthink the impossible, decrypt what might as well be another language. “I’m sorry, bud, you lost me,” he says at last.

Peter laughs, a tired, warbling sound, pulling back from the hug to stare at his crossed legs, the coffee table nearby—anywhere but Tony as he navigates his whistling, too-fast breaths. It’s too much like the first time they did this, except instead of telling his mentor that he’s going to live longer than anticipated, he has to explain that he already has and deal with the fallout.

It’s always the extra that gets him, isn’t it?

“Yeah, that’s fair, I guess. Haven’t had to go through this in a minute, so ‘m sorry if it doesn’t make sense. Pretty much everyone knows already, where I’m from.”

_ Pity in their eyes, the same as what he unearths when he takes the time to read the looks this Bruce gives Tony. _

“I didn’t know for a long time,” he starts, and the words taste like ash in his mouth because he shouldn’t be doing this. Tony always tries to do repairs, and he’s not sure this version of him can take much more of the shitty lot he’s been dealt. “I think it was ten years or something before I totally figured it out?” 

Peter hates hearing himself talk, hates how childish he still sounds after so many years, but he can’t stop the stream of words coming from his lips, messy and imprecise where he wants to be detached, tell his story like it’s not a big deal because if he makes it a big deal then so will Tony and—

“Details are hazy—um—I eventually got diagnosed with this condition—lots of complicated stuff going on with telomerase, and like, they think I could grow a limb back if it got cut off, but there’s not a full explanation for any of it—where I don’t age. Overactive healing factor.”

Everything’s been going so  _ good,  _ almost exactly like it was before he realized, and Peter hateshates _ hates  _ the tears slipping down his cheeks as he keeps going, unable to stop himself.

“It’s—the scientists you had come see me said it was incurable, so yeah, been fifteen for a couple of years now.”

_ Stop crying, stop crying, you’re better than this, you’ve  _ outgrown  _ this— _

“A couple of years?” Tony sounds strained, a hand coming up to rub at his beard like he always does when he doesn’t know what to say.

What does he tell him? This Tony has already lost his Peter; he shouldn’t be shoving his problems onto him too, right?

“Yeah, a decade or two.”

(He never was able to lie to him.)

“Pete,” he breathes softly,  _ knowingly,  _ the one word cutting through all his defenses like he’s always been able to, and Peter looks up at him through the kaleidoscope of tear-heavy lashes, his chest tight.

“It’s fine,” he lies. “Really, really, I’m fine. Let’s just get the accelerator finished, and then I can go back, and you won’t have to worry about this anymore.” 

He tries to stand, except Tony is there, hands on his shoulders and nudging him back down onto the couch. “Come on. No matter what, you’re still my kid. I can take it.”

How can he, Peter wonders. How can this Tony, greyed to the point where it makes his heart race, take it and stay standing when Peter’s had so long to try and numb himself and is still crippled at the thought of all he’s lost?

He shakes his head, wiping at his tears and unable to form words.

“How old are you?” Tony asks, and Peter feels himself shake.

_ Don’t, don’t—you know better— _

“A hundred and twelve.”

Not for the first time, he envies the Peter of this universe for being the one to go. This one never had to outlast May, Tony, and nearly everyone else he cared about.

(This Peter, buried and gone before everyone else, never knew something was wrong the second he met eyes with this Tony because he recognized the pain in them from his reflection.)

“ _ Kid,”  _ he murmurs, so full of feeling it takes everything Peter has not to lose it again to the caliber of when he saw Steve.

He’s choking the words out, thinking of absolutely anything but white sheets and heart monitors and eulogies and is too busy doing that to filter. “Yeah, so I’m an adult even though it’s all kind of fucked up, and you can send me back, promise, it’s no big—”

Tony tugs him close without him having to ask this time, and Peter doesn’t bother trying to speak around the fabric his mouth is crushed against.

Peter’s learned that, no matter how young you look, there still comes a point where people stop holding you, and it takes his breath away to be given relief in the form of something as simple as a hug. It’s not like the first one, though it just happened minutes ago. It’s steadier than that fumbling embrace, immovable and warm and  _ home.  _

_ “I’m sorry,”  _ it whispers just as strongly as it screams  _ “you’re with me now.” _

Tony says nothing about the damp spots forming on his shirt, and Peter clings, content for possibly the first time in his agonizingly long life to be treated like he’s as old as he appears.

//

Once the kid—except he’s not a kid, hasn’t been from the second he came back to him via crash landing in his lab—stops his weird, extremely concerning, hyperventilating-sobbing thing Tony’s almost positive he doesn’t even know he’s doing, Tony’s able to coax him into the kitchen for some breakfast.

He thinks he’s doing an okay job handling it.

Outwardly, he doesn’t think he’s done anything to betray the racing of his mind as it struggles to adjust from  _ watching the kid die as a child soldier for something he should’ve seen coming  _ to  _ realizing the other version of the kid got fucked up spider-genes and has likely now lived through the death of everyone he loves. _

Tony is of the opinion that having him spell things out is a bad idea, considering just trying to pry the admission from him was like cleaning honey off a bear trap, but when weighing the age he was given with his panic upon seeing Steve, it’s not hard to read between the lines. Sticking with the bear trap concept, he also acknowledges that there’s likely other issues still lodged in the crevices, out of easy reach for a cloth’s path, as evidenced by the way Peter won’t look at him and all the tiny things he’s passed off in the weeks since he’s showed up as the odd quirk or bungled sentence, from  _ “Hey, Mr. Stark. Long time, no see,”  _ to the weird bouts of confidence.

He’s staring at his hands, and even though Tony knows now more than ever that he’s capable,  _ strong,  _ he has a hard time getting past how small he looks, shoulders hunched, face suddenly more sallowed than Tony first realized.

“Pancakes or waffles?” he asks, pawing through the cabinets for some mix. 

“Waffles,” he replies just like Tony expected, head still down from where he can see out of the corner of his eye. “Do we have whipped cream?”

“I’ll check,” he assures him, even already knowing he got it stocked when Peter first showed up.

It was instinct, added to the list mechanically as he realized he needed more groceries than what would sustain his admittedly meager diet for the planned lab days, but he doesn’t want to admit something that’s become oddly painful with the revelations of that morning.

When was the last time Peter had someone think about him like that—like someone to be taken care of? Like he’s part of a family?

Twenty minutes and a batter-flecked countertop later, they’ve both got plates in front of them. To Peter’s left sits a can of Reddi-Wip, cap popped off in a single smooth motion to absolutely smother his pile of waffles, sprinkles on top for good measure.

It’s an image so familiar it burns.

Back with his own Peter, they’d done take out nearly every time he’d been over, but breakfast was and is one of Tony’s stronger suits when it comes to cooking. He’s had less time the second time around, focused on returning Peter to his universe except—

Tony’s sets his fork on his plate and turns to face Peter, who’s busy wolfing his breakfast down. “You don’t have anyone waiting for you back home,” he realizes with a start.

Peter, cheeks puffed with the sheer amount of food stuffed in them, somehow manages to swallow and nods. “I have Steve,” he points out, though only having one person to name speaks more to Tony’s credibility than his own. He takes another bite, almost appearing at ease if not for the white of his knuckles as he grips the counter, a crack starting to splinter through the granite. “I visit on Fridays. The nurses give me candy on the way out.”

Tony stares at him, and he keeps eating as if he’ll throw Tony off his case if he can just clean his plate.

“It’s fine,” he tries to assure him, and Tony’s steadily coming to understand the withering looks Rhodey shoots his way when he tells him the same.

_ “It’s not,”  _ he could scream but won’t because he doesn’t want to scare him.

He needs to be the calm one, he decided from the second he understood the extent of what Peter confessed to him. “You could stay,” he offers as casually as possible. “We’d have to get you a new identity and all that, but we’d make it work. Let someone else take care of the accelerator. I’m sure Steve wouldn’t hold it against you.”

The stiffness that rolls over Peter’s body is visible, and he watches the pronged end of his fork dip—bend—with the force of it.

“Don’t say stuff like that,” he whispers.

“I’m serious,” Tony replies, a hair too fast. “You could go back with May, see your friends again.”

He aches for it, for the frame of the two of them to return to its spot above the sink, to fix his nightmares with the knowledge that he has him back again.

“Stop it,” he snaps. “What about Thanos? You all seem pretty convinced he’s a threat. You have to send me back.”   
  


Tony’s thought of that. It was the second thing to come to him after processing all that Peter must’ve lived through. 

(He’s never been good at knowing when to leave well enough alone.)

“Kid, he came in 2018. It’s, what, 21—”   
  


“Don’t say it,” Peter spits, and when Tony turns to face him, it’s not a child staring him down.

He thinks of the masks he made for SHIELD, faces that flicker in and out of focus. One second, Peter is the same as what he knows, and the next the illusion shimmers and falls, revealing the fire raging underneath.

Maybe he’s confined to the same body, but there’s a blaze in his eyes that was only a spark in the version of him Tony knew. “And what good will staying do, huh?” He stands, stool scraping against the floor so loudly it makes Tony wince, but Peter keeps going, unbothered. “I told you, you can’t fix this. What am I supposed to do? Watch you all die?  _ Again?” _

It’s all pain, in every line of his face, the gravity in his steps as he stalks towards him, not tall enough to reach Tony’s brows but full of a bizarrely  _ mature  _ hurt, bitterness that a teenager can’t possibly have seen enough to know.

“We can try again,” he insists. “You know the shit they have in space? Kid—”   
  


“I’m not a kid!” he explodes, the flame billowing up to consume everything in its path. “That’s the whole problem, and I told you, you don’t  _ fucking  _ get it. I’m not fifteen. I’m not your Peter, okay? He’s  _ dead,  _ and I’m not here to be a replacement because you can’t handle it.”

  
The words might as well be a blow for how Tony stumbles back, but Peter covers the extra ground in a single stride, fists clenched, and there’s a second—just one—where Tony is very aware of how much power is contained in that slender body, and he thinks of a bunker, biting cold, and a shield raised above his chest.

It’s quick and fast, unexpected, and his brain—his rationale—goes down. That second, however brief, is long enough to summon his gauntlet, whining with charge as it ends up pressed to Peter’s chest.

Peter looks down at the contact, and while surprise flashes across his expression, he doesn’t back down. He meets Tony’s gaze—brown on brown, fear versus fury—nostrils flaring, breaths hot, and he shoves the repulsor away by his wrist.

Tony doesn’t know what he might’ve said next, what he might’ve done if Peter didn’t let up, and he never finds out because from the doorway comes a whimper—faint, but not enough so to avoid detection. Both of their heads snap to the side to take in Morgan.

_ Fuck. _

“Morgan—” Peter starts, all the heat gone out of his voice in a single moment, leaving him soft—malleable, even—all over again, and Tony sees her trembling, hands clenched around a blanket she’s obviously dragged with her from her room.

He’s with her in an instant, scooping her up and ignoring the vice her arms make around his neck. “It’s okay, we’re okay. I’m sorry we scared you,” he murmurs and looks over where she’s pressed to his shoulder to find Peter, fix whatever the hell just happened, but finds only empty space where he’d been standing moments previous.

He wants to go after him, but Morgan’s still shaking, mumbling questions Tony himself barely has answers for.

_ “Why was Petey yelling? Why was he so close? Why—” _

He soothes her, calloused hands rubbing steady patterns into her back as he wonders how the hell he managed to shatter the fragile, slowly blossoming trust between two pretty fucked up people with a single sentence.

//

_ “You could stay.” _

They’re three words, bite-sized, not intentionally cruel, but Peter can’t put them out of his mind as he makes a break for his room. He feels light-headed from the intensity of his anger and the force with which it dissipated, his world spinning as he eventually settles—limbs spread like a starfish—on the ceiling.

He sucks in air, chest heaving with the loud, almost obnoxious breaths he drags in, and when he feels like he’s not going to pass out, a few things come to him.

For one, he didn’t realize he was capable of blowing up like that. He hadn’t meant to, certainly, but Tony seemed so sure of himself, as if he could actually make it work, as if he could just abandon the problem of Octavius, never mind his relationship with Steve.

(As if maybe he could have another chance.)

The offer was everything Peter wanted and knew he couldn’t have, and Tony just tossed it out like it was nothing.

It hurt but still wasn’t enough to justify the second thing: he’d scared Tony, and maybe more importantly, he’d scared Morgan.

His fingers, previously splayed out like the rest of him, curl so that his nails sink into his palms.

He didn’t even have the excuse of being drunk.

(“She doesn’t mean it,” he’d told Tony, ducking his head to try and hide his rapidly purpling black eye. “She’s fine in the morning, I swear.”)

Peter barely makes it to the bathroom before he’s sick, knees hitting tile as he pitches forward to heave into the toilet bowl.

_ He lost it, he has to be better, he  _ ruined  _ it _ —

The waffles don’t taste nearly as good the second time.

He stays hunched over, not at all sure that he’s done, wiping away a glob of spit that follows in the meantime with the back of his hand. It’s gross, and he flushes the first round down the drain.

How does he fix it? Can he?

He has days left to say goodbye to Tony and he’s going to hate him by the time he leaves, isn’t he?

It hurts when he goes again, stomach cramping in on itself, and this time it’s more acid than food, burning his throat.

He hasn’t moved by the time there’s a knock on the door, background noise to his panic, which he’s normally much better at internalizing.

(What good does it do to show how upset you are when there’s nobody who cares?)

“Peter?” a voice calls, and he straightens up a little, glances towards the bathroom door, at least, instead of clenching his eyes shut and warding off more nausea. Pepper steps into his line of sight like a kind of angel, hair long, curled just so at the ends and a shade of strawberry blonde that Peter’s eventually come to associate with relief—knowing someone older, better than him, will take things out of his hands, even if only for a minute or two.

“Mrs. Potts?” he mumbles, watching but not moving as she drifts closer, crouching down next to him and gently easing him to his bed with her steady hand on his shoulder. “Where’s Mr. Stark? Morgan?”

“Talking,” she assures him. “He’s breaking it down for her, mostly, but you don’t need to worry about it.”

“I’m sorry,” he tries to cut in, tired even though he’s only been up for a few hours. “I just—I got mad. I shouldn’t have said that.”

“He knows, honey. He’s not going to hold it over your head.”   
  


“But Morgan—”

“She’s a strong kid. It’s not the first argument she’s been privy to either. I’m sure it just took her by surprise.”

She pulls the covers up around him, and it’s another thing about his situation that’s utterly disorienting, having someone to care for him when he’s sick. He doesn’t know if she’s still in the dark about everything or if she knows and just doesn’t care. Either way, she sits and stays, her smooth hand squeezing his own as, largely against his will, Peter’s eyes start to feel heavy.

Apparently, blinding anger and subsequent heart-crushing guilt takes it out of you.

He peers out at her through cracked eyelids and remembers all their years together, dinners at the tower, putting his arm around her in Tony’s hospital room, working alongside Morgan to plan her funeral.

“You’re not mad?” he asks, words slow but not yet slurred.

She doesn’t  _ look  _ angry—she’s all cold glares and silence mingled with a spear-tipped comment or two when she is—but Peter isn’t sure. The moment he heard Morgan in the door, he understood how terrible he’d been but fled before he could make amends.

“Frankly, I’m a little concerned about whatever it is that set you off, but I’m not  _ mad,  _ no.”

“Oh.”

Peter’s probably a little too grateful to hear that, and he sags more willingly into the mattress with it in mind. Pepper’s hand moves, fingertips drawing careful circles into his back before moving to his head and gently beginning to toy with the curls she finds there.

(He remembers Pepper, but it seems he’s forgotten how much she meant to him.)

The motion is nice, and Peter’s drifting off before he knows it. As a result, he’s not sure how real the words are that come to him through the murk of his pillow and the desire to just let go for a few seconds.

_ “I never did get the chance to say thank you for bringing him home.” _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> from the bottom of my heart: yikes
> 
> -
> 
> Hi! If you couldn't tell, this fic is going to be something of a wild ride, but I have good news: it's entirely pre-written. That being said, updates will be weekly—on Fridays, to be specific—and I'm beyond excited to finally share this project, which has been in the works since June. With that in mind, be sure to read beginning notes if they're present; in upcoming chapters, they'll have trigger warnings.
> 
> While we're here, there are a few things this fic ignores: Tom Holland’s height according to Google, the actual MCU timeline, the location of Tony’s lil cabin in the woods, and more, I’m sure. Elements of the idea of a particle accelerator as well as Doc Oc as presented in Into the Spider-Verse are also explored in this fic, but they don’t adhere to the same rules, so that’s something to be aware of too. Why are these things ignored? Plot convenience and also because I say so.
> 
> If you liked what you read, kudos and comments are always appreciated! Thanks for stopping by, and if you want to yell at me about this fic or anything else that strikes your fancy, I have a Marvel-only blog that can be found [here!](https://ambivalentmarvel.tumblr.com)
> 
> Edit: Updates are now on Sundays!


	6. VI

Tony’s made sure nearly everyone in the facility—all of five people, granted—knows about his argument with Peter. According to FRIDAY, he spends the time until Tony sees him the next morning sleeping and watching movies, leaving him plenty of time to explain the other details of the spat to mixed reactions. 

“That poor kid,” from Pepper.

“Jesus  _ Christ,” _ —Bruce.

A long,  _ long  _ silence from Steve, brought to an end with a sigh and what could quite possibly be the understatement of the century, even laced as it is with sympathy—understanding: “That’s rough.”

Morgan, ever the exception, is left out of the loop for the time being, less because Tony and Pepper think she can’t handle it and more because by the time they remember the five-year-old should get a heads up too, they’ve already put her to bed.

When Peter walks into the lab, fresh-faced and tapping his foot nervously as he comes to a stop, Bruce’s excuse to remove himself from the situation is nothing short of comical—“ _ Uh, I just remembered Steve said he wants to play _ — _ um _ — _ shuffleboard.” _ —along with the speed with which he flees.

“Yeah, he’s not what you would call confrontational,” Tony quips by the accelerator, drill in hand.

Peter’s just staring at him, and Tony’s internally cursing every god he can think of and a handful of politicians for good measure. Did he already mess it up? Shit. He shouldn’t be joking, right? Shit, shit, sh—

Peter snorts, and Tony’s concern ebbs, however marginally.

“He was like that in my universe too.”

_ Was. _

It sends a chill up Tony’s spine, even after spending the better part of the day analyzing the facts amongst the venom Peter spat that morning.

_ “What am I supposed to do? Watch you all die?  _ Again?”

God, he was insensitive, and despite what he opens his mouth to say, he stays back for the faint fear he still harbors about getting him worked up again. “Look, about yesterday—”

“I’m so sorry.”

The words come so fast, Tony has to take a second to replay them in his head and decipher what it is he’s trying to say. Once he figures it out, he’s lost. “What?” he asks, brows knitting together.

“It was irrational, and I shouldn’t have gotten in your face. Is Morgan okay? I know Pepper said she would be, but I don’t know how much of that she saw, and—”

Peter keeps rambling, and Tony is reminded, painfully, of his nervousness at the airport, all the ridiculous voicemails he sent Happy’s way, even him nudging up towards the end, in the spaceship.

“ _ And this suit is ridiculously intuitive, by the way, so if anything _ —”

“Morgan’s fine,” Tony manages, somewhat breathless. “She’s not great with yelling, but she was better after waffles. But you know you don’t really need to apologize, right?”

Peter scoffs, a shadow falling over his face that Tony doesn’t know how to interpret. “I was horrible,” he protests. “You were just offering, and  _ I’m  _ the one who freaked out.”

“I pushed you into it,” Tony argues back. “It’s not your fault. I should’ve known to stop. You told me to, and I didn’t listen.”

“But that’s not an excuse! I should’ve kept it under control,” Peter insists, cheeks flushed.

Tony could keep feeding into the back and forth, but it occurs to him, hearing Peter pant a little from the strength of his own conviction, how odd it is to be arguing over who messed things up more.

“Did we do this whole blame thing a lot where you’re from?” he asks, and Peter blinks at him a few times.

“What? No—I mean, well, it depends on who you ask ‘cause Pepper would probably say so, but I always thought we were fine—but you’re distracting me.” He straightens up, shoulders rolling back. “I overreacted. I was mean. I shouldn’t have mentioned your Peter.”

That, Tony can’t deny. “Probably not,” he admits. “But I should’ve let up. I’m not holding what happened against you.”

And the next part comes from a place Tony had to seek out after turning the disaster of a conversation over in his head for hours on end, but it’s true.

This Peter’s not—especially knowing what he does now about him—a replacement. 

“You know, I never wanted you to be him. He’s gone, no way around it.”

He’s had to take a break from therapy for a while now, what with the confirmation of alternate universes and the clusterfuck of issues that came with it, but admitting it out loud—he thinks Leigh’ll like hearing about it.

“I like being around you because you’re my kid, no matter where you come from, no matter how old you are. And I should’ve thought about it more before I offered, but if you changed your mind about staying, I’d be here for you for however long I can be.”

He’s trying so,  _ so  _ hard to deliver what he has to say tactfully, and sucks in a quiet breath on instinct, hoping it lands well.

He’s eyeing Peter for a response and panics upon seeing his lips part, eyes dark and watering under the fluorescents of the lab.

_ Oh god _ — _ shit _ — _ goddamnit _ — _ he did it again _ — _ shit _ —

“Sorry, sorry!” Peter’s hands fly up, rubbing at his eyes with the heels of his palms in a motion that should be endearing but mostly just seems painful with how furiously he’s swiping at the wetness there. “Sorry, it’s just—not used to this sort of thing, recently.”

_ Oh, okay then. Crisis averted _ — _ kind of. _

“It’s okay,” Tony assures him, suddenly awkward, unsure. He thought it would be easier, somehow, but Peter’s always been more than he expected. “Just let it out.”

He’s coming closer, hating that he sounds like some kind of tired sign in a school counselor’s office, but Peter seems grateful as he steers him to one of the cleaner tables to sit.

Peter cries for a while, but it’s not the full-body sobs from before, and when he looks up—still not quite finished with the waterworks—he has a smile on, a little bittersweet but genuinely happy as far as Tony can tell. “I really missed you,” he whispers, and rather than blackened skin, Tony has all the spaces he once dreamed Peter would fill flit across his mind—a playmate for Morgan, a well-known, adult hero for the people of New York and the world, a part of the legacy Tony’s always worried about staining.

Tony slings an arm around his shoulder, closing the space remaining between the two of them.

“I missed you too, bud.’”

_ And you’re gonna’ rip that wound open again when you leave. _

//

Dinner that night should be tense, but Peter’s incredibly talented at pumping cheer into the atmosphere, doing a dramatic rendition of the adventure he and Morgan went on earlier to defeat an evil king—a potted plant with an angry face drawn on it, brutally shattered with a frisbee they found laying around—as well as “accidentally” flicking some of his corn into Tony’s hair.

“I have to tell you, Mr. Stark, yellow’s not your color,” he teases, and the only thing stopping Tony from getting his revenge is the look Pepper’s shooting his way.

At any rate, it ends in several rounds of Candyland, all of which Morgan wins despite the array of geniuses, superheroes, and billionaires joining in.

“It’s determined by chance,” Pepper growls, and Tony resists the urge to laugh at seeing her competitive streak coaxed out of her by a children’s game. “ _ Someone,”  _ by which Tony knows she secretly means herself, “else should’ve won by now.”

“It’s harder than it looks,” Peter consoles her, not playing because he claims it’s too hard to reach around the toddler in his lap.

“You be quiet. I think you’re helping her,” she replies, and Tony—normally equally dedicated to a win—is too happy to see his family together to join in the bickering.

From his spot, also sitting the round out, Bruce attempts to stifle the signs of his amusement, while Steve remains hilariously focused on the game.

Tony goes to sleep happy, and for the next few days, is able to ignore the reality just around the corner, all the way up until he, Bruce, and Peter take a step back to take in their work in full.

“All done,” Peter mutters, and in his peripheral, Tony sees his eyes get glassy again.

(They have lunch, and this time, Peter isn’t nearly as upbeat.)

The goodbyes to Pepper and Steve, even Bruce, who goes back to D.C. at Tony’s insistence that he and Peter can fix whatever might go wrong, aren’t as bad as they could be.

Morgan’s is… rough.

“Remember how your dad told you I was back—but only for a little while?” Tony hears him tell her from his spot around the corner—just in case, he told himself.

(Just in case of what, he doesn’t know, but deep within him, something undeniable within him is screaming that he shouldn’t give up even a second of time with the kid.)

“Yeah,” she replies, drawn out and with a touch of dawning panic that sends Tony’s heart jumping in his chest.

“Well,” and here Tony can hear the lump forming in the kid’s throat, “it’s time for me to go again.”

“But you’ll visit, right? Like Uncle Bruce?”

“I—no. I’m sorry, I have to go away for good now.”

Sniffling. Tony puts his fist over his mouth to stop himself from making a sound.

“But—but I wanna’ keep seeing you.”

“I want to see you too, Captain, but I can’t. I’ve had a lot of fun together though, you know?”

“No.”

At that, Tony perks up. He’s never heard her do that— _ sound _ like that before, indignant, immovable in a way children aren’t.

“What?” Peter again, hoarse, bewildered.

“ _ No.” _

As it turns out,  _ just in case _ means just in case Morgan starts screaming and has to be slung over his shoulder and carried back to her room to cry herself out so that Peter can get back to the lab without fifty pounds of howling child hanging off his leg in an attempt to slow him down.

_ “No _ — _ no! Petey can’t go _ — _ Daddy,  _ stop!  _ Daddy, let me go!” _

With Morgan pounding on her door and still shrieking her protest, that just leaves the two of them, Peter’s eyes red and Tony’s back sore from taking the brunt of flailing, desperate feet.

“She’ll be okay,” Tony assures him.

“Yeah,” Peter croaks. “She always is.”

He’s trying to be casual, but his reluctance is betrayed by the glances he keeps casting to Tony’s side, out the door and down the hall.

(It occurs to him, then, that he can probably still hear Morgan’s cries.)

“I’ll be okay too, if you were worried,” Peter tells him through the tears steadily falling down his ruddy face.

Tony believes him, in a sense, but it’s hard to ignore what he knows from experience— _ okay  _ doesn’t mean  _ good. _

“Come here,” Tony manages, and Peter slams into his chest for a hug like a punch, short but so strong there’s a second where Tony can dream that he just won’t let go, but of course, he does, looking like he’s hurting every bit as much as Tony definitely is.

Peter straightens his shoulders, wipes his tears, and meets Tony’s eyes. 

“Let’s do this,” he says, and every second until Tony pulls the metaphorical switch, it’s painfully obvious that all his confidence is faked for his benefit.

Tony activates the accelerator, and all that serves as his second chance disappears with an echo of the energy that took his first.

//

Peter, as anticipated, lands on the ground of the room he originally got ripped from with a grunt, an emotional wreck but actually prepared this time to stop the accelerator just as soon as he can breathe again.

He left Tony behind to shut this thing down, he reminds himself through the pain, and that gives him the incentive to try and move. He winces, pushing himself up on shaking palms and then turns his head to find Octavius all of two inches from his face, eyes massive through the thick lenses of her glasses and a grin tugging at her thin lips that gives Peter the incredibly vivid sensation of being a cartoon mouse with its tail caught under a cat’s paw. Part of him feels bad, but despite the few weeks off he’s had, he’s not over having to fight the Vulture for the second time. Besides, he acts on instinct more than anything else when he reaches up and knocks her off him with a well-placed left hook.

She flies across the room, lab coat flapping in the air before she lands in the corner. Peter, on the other hand, draws himself to his feet and wipes the trail of blood from his aching nose, heading for the impressive wall of computers she has assembled to try and figure out how to disable the accelerator as tremors run through the ground under his feet.

He can’t say he’s expecting it when something latches around his waist, tossing him back and knocking the breath out of him for the second time inside five minutes.

“That was  _ rude _ ,” Octavius seethes, and Peter’s twisting allows him to see what he can only call a tentacle latch around his ankle, sweeping him off his feet and lifting him upside down into the air. 

Peter puts that she’s the one controlling the tentacles—and the plural is definitely deserved, now seeing the rest swirling around her dangerously—together, and his eyes narrow behind his mask. “So was sending me to an alternate universe, but you don’t see me complaining,” he retorts, folding himself up to grip the tentacle with both hands and  _ twist,  _ shattering the metal with ease.

He drops to the ground in a crouch but doesn’t stay for long, dodging the blows Octavius sends his way.

_ Shit,  _ she’s fast, and Peter’s so busy trying to avoid her, all thoughts of his penthouse, empty and waiting, and weekly visits to the only person he has left that cares about him are wiped from his mind and leave him with nothing but single-minded focus, every bit the reason Peter throws himself into a fight these days.

(It’s always easier to be a hero than a person.)

“Quit moving,” she growls, and he hops onto the accelerator in hopes that she’ll prioritize her work over attacking him.

(Heroes can work alone.)

No such luck.

One of the appendages slams into where he’d been seconds previous, denting the machinery with a crunch.

(Heroes can even  _ like  _ being alone.)

“I just want to know how you got back here,” she coos, and Peter’s reminded of the whole cat thing again, scrambling up the wall as he tries to figure out how to go about shutting things down now that Octavius has extra limbs on hand.

(When he’s just Peter, there’s no reason for him to be by himself.)

“None of your business, lady,” he snaps, cringing at the sound of the arms and the crushed metal they leave in their wake. “Not too gentle with your own scientific breakthrough, are you?”

The comment’s mostly said to himself, but Octavius apparently hears and finds it hilarious if her laughter is any indication. “I can repair machines,” she drawls, and Peter glances over his shoulder to find the tentacles sinking into the wall to follow him and drag her with. “I’ve never seen what happens when I send someone in from our side of things.”

(When he’s just Peter, he has to think about the universe where there are people left who want to see him, and he has to think about how he had to leave it behind.)

He lets himself fall, but either she’s getting a better grasp of his abilities or she’s just that fast because the tentacles catch him maybe halfway down and  _ cinch,  _ and Peter screams as he feels his ribs break.

(It’s not the same pain, but as spots dance before his eyes, he thinks of flying shrapnel, burning sand, and faltering wings—a single night that forever changed the rest of Peter the hero’s and Peter the person’s life.)

“Now then,” Octavius hums, settling gracefully at the top of her invention. “That solves that. Not so limber now, are we?”

The tentacles loosen, leaving him limp and helpless, and Peter grits his teeth together in an attempt to quiet himself. She comes closer, head tilted in curiosity as she crouches down. “You know, I wonder—”

Her fingers grip the edge of his mask and lift it to reveal a bruised, deceivingly young face. Her eyes get wide, eyebrows shooting up. “Huh, you’re just a ki—”

(In nearly every universe, Peter has known worse than some broken bones, and today, he’s not the outlier.)

“I’m really not,” he grits out, and she’s surprisingly easy to web down when taken by surprise, the container unit for the tentacles just a piece of metal once Peter rips it off her back, malleable under his hands and splintered into a thousand different pieces while Octavius shouts in protest.

He wraps an arm around his side and ignores her, limping and swearing up a storm all the way back to the computers. It’s not all that hard to find what essentially serves as a kill switch, and having fought far less intelligent villains, he has to give props to Octavius for programming the power source to detach and then explode instead of rigging the whole thing to blow. Peter’s finger is hovering over the button when he doubles over coughing—eyes clenched shut, a thousand knives sinking into his torso when he so much as thinks about moving—and hears something wet hit the floor along the way.

He looks down at the puddle he’s made.

Peter can’t remember a time where something in his life wasn’t red.

_ His parents’ car _ — _ Ben’s shirt in that alley _ — _ his suit _ —

“Shit,” he mumbles.

Peter’s had plenty of time to get to know his own body, and even if he hadn’t, he’s nearly positive that with his only company being a deranged scientist who he just stuck a story or two in the air, he’s not going to get any medical attention for internal bleeding.

Ninety-seven years ago, give or take, Peter made the executive decision to remove the shrapnel lodged in the same body he has now. Now, there’s no shrapnel, but he does have a healing factor working supernaturally hard to keep him kicking, a computer, and someone he knows is tenacious enough to find a message he leaves him in SI’s servers: the address for Steve’s home and  _ tell Rogers that Queens says goodbye. He’ll fill you in. Good luck, kid. _

He, for one, thinks it’s hilarious to use the epithet in reference to Peter Stark, who will not be half as amused when he finds the culprit behind the hack his head of cybersecurity will be shitting bricks over.

Peter’s sorry to be leaving Steve as the last man standing, but it’s getting hard to formulate actual thoughts when his chest hurts so badly and the lady—Octavius, Peter remembers with effort—is shouting about backward progress and censorship. His eyes are initially drawn to her because of the racket she’s making, but he sees something dark laying near her.

_ Hey, that’s my mask,  _ Peter thinks after a long second of staring, and he starts climbing to get it. Sure, they’ll remove it from his corpse, but it’s the principle of the thing. He’s gone ninety-eight years without revealing his identity to the public, and he’ll die that way, damnit.

It hurts like a bitch, but he makes his way to the top of the accelerator and, once the mask is on, takes a second to admire the vortex swirling below. The pop-up that went with the self-destruct setting described the reasoning behind it, opening one last portal to drain the majority of the accelerator’s energy reserves to make the final blast as non-lethal as possible.

It makes sense, at least to Peter’s addled mind, and if nothing else, it’s pretty. He still thinks so when Octavius, webbed down but not entirely immobile, takes a last shot at petty revenge and manages to stretch her leg out to give him a shove. What wouldn’t normally bother him, in his weakened state, has him falling yet again.

Peter, for all his grief, has never been suicidal so much as wanting to see everyone again, though knowing he is dying, he’s alright with it. He’s lived longer than most people can dream of, and Tony isn’t  _ everyone,  _ but it is nice to see him again, even if he does seem more panicked than anticipated.

_ “T’ny,’”  _ he breathes, relieved, and succumbs to the darkness edging at his vision willingly with the assurance that Tony’s there too.

//

In the agonizing hours before anyone knows if Peter Parker, centurion and superhero, will survive, a universe away, Peter Stark sits down with Captain America, whose hair is white but smile is still genuine as ever, and hears the story of his namesake while Doctor Olivia Octavius is found by police sent to investigate her lab on reports of suspicious activity. A universe away, Peter Stark connects her story about a boy who climbed walls and webbed her down to what he’s been told and is left with the impossibly long story of Spider-Man _ ,  _ otherwise known as Peter Parker, who he eventually reveals in full to an amazed world that proceeds to idolize the boy who never stopped serving them. A universe away and a few hours after Steve Rogers understands that, whatever happened, he doesn’t need to keep the kid company, nurses find him in his bed, gone permanently to sleep and perfectly at peace with that fate.

//

Tony might just kill the kid, and yes, he’ll call him kid because he wants to strangle him every bit as much as he wanted to the first time around.

Internal bleeding? Literally every single one of his ribs broken?

Tony  _ gets  _ that the whole universe hopping thing had a good amount of time travel thrown in there too, but five minutes didn’t pass between the kid disappearing and Tony hearing the thump his body made hitting the floor on the return trip. What the hell did he manage to get up to?

Tony parks himself next to his bed waiting for the answer, still at the facility because maybe he’d been optimistic when he built it but not  _ that  _ optimistic, and the doctors at the actual hospital cleared him to be moved days ago.

Waiting to see if he’d pull through was one of the more terrifying experiences Tony had under his belt, made worse by what his last words would be if he didn’t.

_ “I don’t wanna’ go,”—“I’m sorry,”—“Mr. Star,’”—“‘Love you,”— _ “T’ny,”—

He’d had more than one nightmare about it, fallen asleep from sheer exhaustion in the waiting room chairs—a miracle in and of itself—but the doctors and the non-disclosure agreements stuffed with the help of Tony’s checkbook down their throats said his healing factor was unbelievable.

_ “We’ve never seen anything like it _ — _ nobody in the medical community has.” _

It’s especially impressive considering the multiple papers written on Steve’s metabolism and made more peculiar by the fact that their observations showed this Peter outperforming what he had on record of his own.

_ “We had to rebreak several of his ribs, which had started to heal wrong. I think I speak for all of us if when I say if he can’t make it, no one in his situation can.” _

Their bewilderment should’ve been a red flag, along with the face on the one who came to give him the rundown of his injuries, but as far as Tony was concerned, the familiar way Peter defied expectations was storm clouds clearing overhead.

He’d been dead and came back to Tony.

He’d looked fifteen and been nearly a century older.

He’d said he was leaving for good—

And Tony watches his eyes flutter and then slide all the way open, flitting around the room before coming to rest on him, stationed directly to his side. 

His brows furrow. “Mr. Star,’” he croaks, not that Tony blames him, what with being asleep for the better part of a week.

Tony smiles, and even after believing for days now that he’d see him wake up, a weight lifts off his chest. “Right with you, bud,” he replies. “How you feeling?”

The kid blinks, groaning as he tries to sit up. “Like I got hit by a train, but it wasn’t going, like, super fast.” 

He reaches over, fiddling with his IV drip, and Tony tugs his hand away for fear of him accidentally pulling it out. “Yeah? That’s good. Doctors weren’t sure how much of what to give you.”

The kid huffs a laugh, and then he gets strangely quiet, somber. “Do you know what happened?” he asks, and his voice makes him sound so small,  _ lost,  _ it makes Tony ache.

He shakes his head. “As far as I know, I sent you on your merry way, and you fell back out of the sky a few minutes later and didn’t move.”

Tony’s been keeping it at bay by putting his all into focusing on Peter’s recovery, but seeing him that still again—

(He really needs to get to seeing Leigh one of these days.)

“So I’m back? I’m not—” he trails off, and Tony  _ knows  _ he’s not trying to upset him, but the implication makes his heart skip a beat.

“Yeah, you’re fine. One hell of a healing factor, ever heard that?” He doesn’t blow up like he did before, but Tony watches some of the color drain out of Peter’s face and decides to move on. “So, since we skipped explanations earlier to get you to a hospital, you wanna’ fill me in?”

Peter nods, but Tony doesn’t miss how jerky his movements are when he tugs at his sheets, even just fidgets. “Turns out, the lady who made the accelerator had these tentacle—uh—things. She kinda took me by surprise and—”

He makes a motion with his hands that makes the reason for the bruises Tony knows wind around his torso like a python stunning clear, and he has to focus on the kid’s gestures, the rise and fall of his chest, to remind himself that it’s okay.

“I remember setting the accelerator to self-destruct and getting on top of it, but the details are hazy.” He shakes his head, biting his lip like Tony remembers from when he was concentrating on a project in the lab. “She must’ve pushed me in so I couldn’t turn her in or something. ‘Course, I was dying at that point, but she was webbed all the way up there, so she wouldn’t have known. I guess it was still set on this dimension, only being a minute or two since I fell in and came back over there.” He glances up from where he’s been focused on his lap, lips quirking in what could quite possibly be the most pitiful attempt at a smile Tony’s ever seen. “I’m really sorry you’ll have to go through the trouble of sending me back.”

Tony, in a stunning lack of his usual wit, blanches. He thinks he could sort out what Peter means if he thinks hard enough about it, but the words are so odd, they just don’t fit in his mind. “What?” he finally asks, squinting as if he looks hard enough, he’ll be able to make sense of the last bit of what Peter’s said.

The kid looks at him like he’s crazy. “Sending me back? I mean, I don’t exactly fit here. You had your Peter, and I’m not him, so, you know—” He shrugs instead of finishing his sentence, and finally, things align for Tony to process.

“You fit,” Tony insists. “You’re Peter.”

“Yeah, but—”

“But nothing. I mean, if you want to go back,”  _ offer him a way out, don’t fuck it up again, “ _ you can, but you stopped her, didn’t you? Why would you need to?”

“There’s still St—”

Whatever he was about to say very clearly dies on his lips, and Tony sees the gears turning behind his eyes, him checking for dotted Is and crossed Ts as he goes down the list spelling out every reason it wouldn’t work.

(Peter mentions it passing but never goes into the details of the goodbye he left for Steve to Tony and, furthermore, how it was more for him than anything, when he looks back on it.)

There’s a long moment where Peter says nothing, and Tony holds his breath. Then, cautiously, as if afraid of an explosion on Tony’s part, Peter poses a question that simultaneously tugs on the loose stitching—there before but reinforced over the last few weeks—holding his heart together and cracks the door to getting it sent to the tailor’s.

“You want me here?”

Tony reaches for his hand and squeezes and would hug him if he weren’t so terrified of doing anything to worsen his wounds.

“I want you here, for however long we have.”

Peter starts crying at that, but for once, neither of them worry about it, and when his tears are dry, there are new avenues of discussion that Tony is happy to explore.

“So, kid, you mentioned me, Bruce, and Wakanda, and while I’m not a fan of his whole bippity boppity shtick, have you tried Strange?”

To that, Tony receives nothing but confusion.

“What?”

(It’s a special kind of cruelty, that without Thanos, without  _ I don’t wanna’ go  _ and  _ T’ny,  _ Peter never found the man capable of undoing his condition.)

One day, nearly two years after he decided to stay, Tony receives a text, sent from Peter, back with May and Ned and even that scary girl, MJ, under a new name and at a new school, a side by side of yearbook photos.

  
Past the awkward smile, the change is obvious, the leaner face, the way his curls go from cute to charming, and Tony’s breakfast tastes sweeter that morning.

As for Peter, Tony doesn’t know the visits he makes to the Spider-Man memorial, sitting and talking to the version of himself that died for his universe and left jagged edges the other Peter tries his best to blunt.

_ “Thanks for holding down the fort, but I can take care of them now. I’ve got the experience, don’t worry. You just rest up, okay?” _

After all, Peter understands how hard it is to be a child bearing the weight of the world.

And there are still calls made in the dead of night, yes. Tony—reeling from visions of a boy attached to his hand. Peter—convinced he’s all alone again. But there are also the ones during the day, Morgan babbling about Kindergarten or asking when he’s going to visit, where Peter gets to see all the good in his life without the edge of knowing he’ll outlast it, where Tony sees what it’s like to really have another child, and for both of them, the simple security offered by the certainty of enough time is more than they could’ve ever hoped for.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And here we are!! This fic was a great time to write, and thank you to anyone who took the time to read it and especially to everyone who commented along the way. Your feedback means the world to me. <33


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